alright, for those of us who're looking to continue trading the increased vol, it's key to make sure we go with the most robust brokers
eg: for all those who saved a few bucks on commissions with Robinhood, probably many arent too happy now given all those outages as reported in the news, etc
even JPM's platform reportedly had some users being locked out last Friday, according to Bloomberg news
so let's review and compare the performance of various platforms right now, given that the unprecedented volumes and volatility make it all the more important to differentiate and stratify the brokers by
1) how robust are their platforms - consistency of being able to login anytime, actually place trades, working datafeeds, low slippage
2) how customer friendly they are in not raising futures margins with no warning
3) how financially secure and legit they are - eg not likely to blowout like some smaller ones did after Swiss franc unpeg
more interested in recent performance of US futures brokers personally, but pls feel free to pitch in for international firms as well
IB - outage reported by others on twitter for Mar 5-6, my experience is they have relatively higher margins to begin with, and have tendency to raise those margins even more during times of volatility, 95%+ of the time the feed and execution is ok but there remain those times when the feed on TWS breaks or orders cannot be placed and it takes 5-10+ mins to be back up again. on the whole i rate them:
Platform performance - 4/5
Customer friendly margin policy - 3/5
Financials - seems stable
Etrade - ?
TradeStation - ?
TDAmeritrade - ?
Schwab - ?
eg: for all those who saved a few bucks on commissions with Robinhood, probably many arent too happy now given all those outages as reported in the news, etc
even JPM's platform reportedly had some users being locked out last Friday, according to Bloomberg news
so let's review and compare the performance of various platforms right now, given that the unprecedented volumes and volatility make it all the more important to differentiate and stratify the brokers by
1) how robust are their platforms - consistency of being able to login anytime, actually place trades, working datafeeds, low slippage
2) how customer friendly they are in not raising futures margins with no warning
3) how financially secure and legit they are - eg not likely to blowout like some smaller ones did after Swiss franc unpeg
more interested in recent performance of US futures brokers personally, but pls feel free to pitch in for international firms as well
IB - outage reported by others on twitter for Mar 5-6, my experience is they have relatively higher margins to begin with, and have tendency to raise those margins even more during times of volatility, 95%+ of the time the feed and execution is ok but there remain those times when the feed on TWS breaks or orders cannot be placed and it takes 5-10+ mins to be back up again. on the whole i rate them:
Platform performance - 4/5
Customer friendly margin policy - 3/5
Financials - seems stable
Etrade - ?
TradeStation - ?
TDAmeritrade - ?
Schwab - ?
