After todays debacle I am going to close my IB account at months end. I typically generate $10,000 in commissions per month. Today luckily I only lost a few hundred bucks because the system was down and I could not get through to customer service because of busy signals. The system was down 50 minutes during a busy part of the day. I am lucky I did not lose thousands of dollars.
I emailed management to get a rebate for my losses and this was their response:
"As you know when an outage occures and you can not trade when you want to,
the market can go in your favor or against you.
Indeed, as it happens many people who suffer such losses, ans some more who only
claim that they do, would like us to pay them , but never one who benefits offers to pay us.
Had we followed that policy we would have gone out of business long ago."
My response was, "with that type of customer service you will go out of business." Hmmm good business decision, "Lose a $10,000/month commission generator instead of rebating a few hundred bucks." And thanks for telling me that the market can go either way and I could have benefited from the outage. Thats not the point. The point is I want to be able to react to the direction of the market and I cant do it if the system is down and I cannot phone in an order. I dont want any freebies.
Needless to say I gave retail trading a shot and was very dissappointed. I am back on the market for a prop shop and will be looking for low commissions, excellent customer service, and reliable systems.
I emailed management to get a rebate for my losses and this was their response:
"As you know when an outage occures and you can not trade when you want to,
the market can go in your favor or against you.
Indeed, as it happens many people who suffer such losses, ans some more who only
claim that they do, would like us to pay them , but never one who benefits offers to pay us.
Had we followed that policy we would have gone out of business long ago."
My response was, "with that type of customer service you will go out of business." Hmmm good business decision, "Lose a $10,000/month commission generator instead of rebating a few hundred bucks." And thanks for telling me that the market can go either way and I could have benefited from the outage. Thats not the point. The point is I want to be able to react to the direction of the market and I cant do it if the system is down and I cannot phone in an order. I dont want any freebies.
Needless to say I gave retail trading a shot and was very dissappointed. I am back on the market for a prop shop and will be looking for low commissions, excellent customer service, and reliable systems.
