IB is down again.
- Thread starter LondonHedger
- Start date
There are dozens of reasons to stay away from IB, this is just the latest!
There’s a reason many active traders choose IB, even when all the retail shops have made trading “free”. Because selling your order flow and bad fills cost a lot more than a commission, and when you trade actively that matters a lot.
I’m not defending their recent outage, but if you want to compare how many times that Schwab or TDA or E*TRADE etc went down or had serious issues for at least half a day, you’ll find many examples in the past decade and to my knowledge every time IB was fine, and that disproportionately includes high volume, high volatility days which are the most important for traders to be able to trade.
On Monday I traded through several other brokers, and it was just another reminder of how much better the tools were at IB. Not just for actually trading (those are so much better it’s not even close), but for charts and books and so forth that help you make a good trade.
First off, Schwab, TDA, or E*TRADE are no more made for professionals than IB. I happen to use Dash clearing with Apex but there are quite a lot of other professional level Introducing Brokers, some of whom like @Robert Morse are active here. No reason to ever use any of the retail brokers including Interactive Brokers unless you're forced to by your company or spouses company compliance rules or just don't know any better. I once fell into both those categories and made the IB mistake, so I'm not trying to put anyone down, just save the frustration I had.
Secondly, even Schwab et al. will never auto-liquidate your position because they have a mysterious black box they treat as a demigod, even referring to it themselves in capitals as "The Algorithm" which decided to do so. I lost a somewhat significant amount in an autoliquidation of an SPX vertical spread which was mathematically impossible to lose more that the 5 points of the 5 point spread because shitty programming in The Algorithm caused it to use ridiculous bid/ask prices to determine the spread value.....then sold my position into that price! As far as I know they refuse to even acknowledge that as a bug to this day, let alone make any attempt to fix it. It wasn't a life changing loss, but it was far more lost in a second than I would save on better order execution over the next 10 years, even if that was significant, which it's not for the products I trade! Nor will they charge you margin on ES debit spreads (where you can never lose more than you paid for the spread). Or put you on hold for an hour before picking up the phone. Only to connect you to a "customer service" rep who knows nothing about basic stock and option trading mechanics and can only stupidly parrot "The Algorithm determined it". And on and on I could go with the crap you will get from IB that you won't get from even the other big retail brokers (I've had an IRA at Schwab for 20 years, night and day when I have to interact with them). As I said, the outage is only the latest of dozens of reasons to stay away from IB.
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Hmmmmm. It seems I am of two minds. 
"Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" -- what a great book.
"Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" -- what a great book.
They have system maintenance that was schedule for today.
Their website is stating that.
Having opened an account with IB recently, I'm also not delighted to hear about their recent outage. With a German broker I'd be able to seek compensation for losses incurred by Broker downtime (if it's not caused by an earthquake or something the company could not possibly have prevented. Network problems are definitely avoidable), but that's apparently not possible with IB and other major brokers. May I ask you which brokers you would recommend instead?
I am currently with Dash clearing with Apex. I know @Robert Morse is a knowledgeable and helpful contributor here to the extent I don't think you could go wrong going with him as an IB. At the end of the day though, even Schwab is better than IB, I have my IRA there and they're not spectacular but solid on everything.