Originally posted by Magna
I'm surprised that this thread, with IB in the title, hell with "Closing my IB account" being the title, and currently 7 pages long, hasn't enticed Def to jump in yet. I'd be real interested in his perspective on this.
Originally posted by zcar
IB does a great deal of institutional and program trading. It will be interesting to see if and how the other customers besides retail were affected. Are they on separate server farms, backups, connections?
Anyone knows?
Originally posted by PuffyGums
I dont think an electronic only brokerage is ever going to have the staff to enter orders manually if there is an outage which effects many traders. Too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time.
If you are trading with significant size, you need a backup broker to server as your 'customer service.' Thats the only solution. The more expensive brokers may be marginally better, yet that is no solution as a trader needs low costs.
I wonder even if an LFG or a Refco really has the order desk of the size they used to to handle such an outage? The phone order desk has got to be something that is generally being phased out.
Originally posted by darkhorse
as a general rule institutional quality brokers not only have backups, they have backups for their backups.
maybe that explains why retail gets screwed whenever IB has a problem. it's all hands on deck for the whales with the special phone number.