To the thread title, Schwab is an order of magnitude bigger than IB and only a tiny fraction of their customers use margin at all. That's far safer than IB's Auto liquidation algorithms which are likely to cost you personally because they're poorly written, and as we saw with the oil debacle don't actually protect IB either. If safety of your broker from speculators is the criteria you use to choose your broker (seems a crazy criteria to me) then IB is pretty far down the list.
Bye bye IB, hello Schwab
- Thread starter tonyf
- Start date
Great thread, thanks for the info. I'm a US citizen living abroad and find myself in the same grey area as so many others in my situation, being US citizens with no US residence.
TDAmeritrade has an international section that we signed up with, but they have a limited trading window of 8 am to 8 pm EST.
Until recently I had another account with Webull but I closed it once it was clear I needed to be a US resident and I got tired of their various glitches. That's also when I realized they are based in China... no thank you.
So I signed up with IB because I can trade 4 am to 8 pm EST. However, that platform is really, really difficult to get used to for a newbie stock day trader like me. On one hand it has way too many options to tinker with and on the other the graphics and layout are right out of 1980's MS Access.
Webull was super clean and intuitive and great for me to learn the basics on. TOS is close, just not as intuitive. IB is a monster on which I only use the buy/sell interface and TOS for everything else. I'm just surprised by how few options are out there.
TDAmeritrade has an international section that we signed up with, but they have a limited trading window of 8 am to 8 pm EST.
Until recently I had another account with Webull but I closed it once it was clear I needed to be a US resident and I got tired of their various glitches. That's also when I realized they are based in China... no thank you.
So I signed up with IB because I can trade 4 am to 8 pm EST. However, that platform is really, really difficult to get used to for a newbie stock day trader like me. On one hand it has way too many options to tinker with and on the other the graphics and layout are right out of 1980's MS Access.
Webull was super clean and intuitive and great for me to learn the basics on. TOS is close, just not as intuitive. IB is a monster on which I only use the buy/sell interface and TOS for everything else. I'm just surprised by how few options are out there.
use a front end to IB such as www.medvedtrader.com for $20 a month or the free version of www.motivewave.com They use the free IB datafeed.
No, he is not at all for you. Wait till you have to fill a form with all kind of information. You will be refused for 100%.
It appears that you are a student without any money???
Yes sir, you are right. As a solution I am searching prop firms novadays. I think it is the most optimal option for me currently. Am I right?