Monthly Statement Idiocy At IB

[DeeDeeTwo]

Monthly Statements are crucial...
For auditing or regulatory requirements...
Since it's next to impossible...
To evaluate the integrity of an account...
Using 253 daily statements.

IB currently has a maximum size of 20 MB...
For a Monthly Statement.

It's much worse than that sounds...
Because that 20 MB is based on a bloated Word document...
Which is 90% air and zips down to < 1 MB.

So IB effectively limits the size of their Monthly Statement...
To < 1 MB of compressed data... which is about 350 trades/day.

Every 14 year old running a blog...
Is familiar with compression technology (zipping a file)...
But IB "engineers" are not only unaware of this...
But insist on sending uncompressed, unencrypted documents over the web.

Not only that...
This silly cap did not even exist is 2007...
But with volume up by 50% in 2008...
It must have sounded like just the perfect way...
For IB to torment their best clients.

This is actually so crazy...
That no adult would ever believe this story could possibly be true...
And I would be shocked if this policy...
Is "in compliance" with NASD reporting requirements for Customer accounts.

Does anyone know how to get larger Monthly Statements out of IB?

 

[brocklanders]

What happens if you hit the 20 mb limit? Does it just truncate the trade data in the download file? Do you still get the complete trade activity through their online monthly statements?

I agree that their download activity options are crap. They need to allow you to download a CSV file... I could understand a
1 gb limit or something but 20 mb is a joke. At least then you could do a custom import in Excel rather than a mirror image of the online statement. You could fit so much more data in a similar sized CSV file vs Word. I have not personally hit this limit but I am curious if there is a workaround also.

Maybe you should put up a feature suggestion and encourage everyone to vote on it. That is the best way to get new improvements added.