Something I've had a minor, but non-zero concern about for a while: to what extent are brokerage employees able to access client accounts and review a client's holdings or trading activity? (I'm an IB client but the Q goes for any brokerage.) Trading is a zero-sum game, and -- in addition to nosy employees -- most brokerage firms have internal prop trading desks who are essentially competitors of the brokerage clients. Information about what the bigger or more profitable clients are doing would seem to be critically sensitive information. Even if it doesn't take the most malicious form of, say, monitoring a client's open trades in real-time and exploiting that intel, employees could review successful clients' records to identify and replicate proprietary algos or strategies, etc.
Employees obviously have full access to your accounts when you're in a secure / verified environment like a Support phone call or online chat, but can they pull up client records at will at other times? I'd like to think that reputable brokerage systems would keep electronic audit trails of who accesses an account and when, but I have no idea whether that happens in practice. Are there known instances of brokerages accessing client accounts to steal strategies or otherwise exploit them? Is this all too tinfoil-hatty?
Employees obviously have full access to your accounts when you're in a secure / verified environment like a Support phone call or online chat, but can they pull up client records at will at other times? I'd like to think that reputable brokerage systems would keep electronic audit trails of who accesses an account and when, but I have no idea whether that happens in practice. Are there known instances of brokerages accessing client accounts to steal strategies or otherwise exploit them? Is this all too tinfoil-hatty?
