Note the Barron's writeup on IB doesn't address any of the standard a§§clown complaints.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/in...-top-spot-in-online-broker-ranking-1521854071
Interactive Brokers Takes Top Spot in Online Broker Ranking
Interactive Brokers (4½ stars) returns to the top spot in our survey after a year of impressive growth. Though its range of services, low costs, and technology make it an excellent fit for extremely frequent traders—average annualized transactions per account hit 476 in this year’s volatile February—the firm has broadened its menu to appeal to less active clients, as well.
The updated client portal that launched last fall is very responsive; it automatically adjusts the display, depending on which device you’re using. On some, it offers a simpler view of Interactive’s complex Traders Workstation platform, which will supplant its Web Trader this year. The software has become friendlier and offers a ton of information on a single page. You can customize the quote page to display graphs of various types, with a news ticker in the right-hand column.
Within the Traders Workstation on desktop or iPhone, you’ll find Interactive Brokers’ natural-language assistant, IBot, which lets you ask questions in plain English and get a quick answer. For example, rather than digging for an options chain, you can ask IBot to display a particular strike and expiry date by saying, “Show options chain for SPY for the next three expirations.” You can type in queries or use voice recognition. It’s slick and reduces the learning curve.
Interactive Brokers is known for allowing clients to trade around the world and around the clock. More prosaically, it now has a robo-advisory service, IB Asset Management, geared to people who don’t want to trade too often. Among the possibilities: 13 index-tracking portfolios that hold fractional shares of the companies in whatever benchmark they’re based on.
Through IBot, investors can use institutional-level trading algorithms to accumulate or sell large positions. The client chooses the desired starting price, order type, and price increment over a set period. In addition, options traders can access a wide variety of spread tools; one lets them roll a spread to a future month with just a couple of clicks.
On mobile platforms, you’ll find the Mobile Order Wheel. It lets you use your thumb to choose price, spread, dollar value of the trade, and other possibilities. About 50 more data points were added to the charting function on mobile devices, and IBot can help you learn about them.
Fixed-income traders can use the secondary bond market scanner, which includes reports on municipal bonds. In a nice touch, the system offers links to local newspapers, where you can get the skinny on the projects tied to the bonds.
A new service called Traders’ Academy provides lessons to both clients and noncustomers. Each course has two to eight lessons with quizzes along the way. Another offering is the PortfolioAnalyst, which can review assets held outside IB for complete analysis of your financial position. PortfolioAnalyst will be made available to non-IB clients later this year, and could be the answer to the death of Google Finance’s portfolio feature.
One issue with IB is that you can only display streaming quotes on one platform at a time, so if you log in to your mobile app while the desktop platform is still running, one of them will be restricted to snapshot quotes rather than streaming. This seems like a quibble. But in light of the push toward uniform client experiences, it should be addressed.
