I have also lodged a formal complaint and compensation claim. I used to work as a Trustee with oversight of various fund managers. It's normaly a legal requirement for the party that causes loss to the fund to compensate the fund by the same amount. So if the broker causes a loss, and the FM had no control, then ultimately the broker would compensate, but often the process would be drawn out as you can imagine. More often than not, it's the FM that screw up and have to compensate, but again they will drag their heels and often do deals with the service providers, who sometimes make payments to keep the FM 'happy' and on their books, which of course is a conflict of interest and not meant to happen.
I see some people have pointed out there are numerous get out clauses in the agreement. These are probably not going to help IB in court, but will certainly help to slow things down significantly, which is of course their purpose to deter people from making a formal compensation claim.
I expect in my case they will argue any losses are specualtive.
In my case, they sent a rather amusing response when I asked them to immediately bust a trade that I couldn't cancel as had no access (on any level including phone). They said the exchange wouldn't accept the bust request and then they told me I should mange my risk appropriately when trading. You can imagine the response they got to that wisdom. I fully expect to take this to the UK regulator to get any fair compensation, and that's what I will be doing. Just opened an Etoro account as a back up untill I determine which broker is appropriate. As many have noted, the way IB handled this is a compensation claim in its self. I have requested detailed logs from IB as back up to support my claims. They have not provided these yet. I took various screen shots during the outage. If anyone needs these as backup, send me message.
