looks like IBKR looking to acquire Tradestation

The avg IBKR trader trades over 600 times a year. The average TRAD trader trades over 400 times per year. The avg ETFC, AMTD, and Schwab trader makes under 30 trades per year. TRAD is the last place to find the kind of high-volume trader suited for the IBKR platform . . . TRAD does about the equivalent of 25% of IBKR volume, which is pretty remarkable for a firm with just $2.5 in client capital (IBKR has about $18 billion in client capital, if I remember correctly). So as far as growth goes, for IBKR it's pretty much TRAD or bust.
 
By the way, I think the reason IBKR has been so effective is that Petterfy is a trader. I can't think of any other firm run by a trader. Certainly not Schwab or Ameritrade or Etrade. The IBKR business model is making money on transactions, not on interest margin. An enormous amount of the profits at Schwab for instance comes from interest on client cash, so it's essentially run as a bank, and ETFC is a bank.
 
Quote from Eight:

Tradestation is the best charting, always has been, if IB integrated it I'd be over there in a quick minute... I'm writing dll's in Sierra Charts as it is, one could get Powerbasic and write a dll to call from EZLanguage and not have to wait for IB to decide what they are going to do...
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So if ts is the best charting, then what would an intraday futures trader be doing with another platform? What is more important than charting to an intraday futures trader? Saving 100 bucks a month? Is that really worth it if tradestation charting is really the best?
 
There is no way IBKR would buy TRAD for $250 million just for nicer charting/software.
For a small fraction of that price they could buy lots of really great data/charting vendors. For an even smaller price they could just hire more programmers to clean up TWS and make all its features work the way they are supposed to.
BTW what ever happened to the FutureTrade acquisition and integration?
 
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