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> I am curious as far as reliability on IB electronic system for
> futures, i.e.: Eminis, SP-NQ.
>
> Can anybody give me an insight into this ???
>
I've used IB for daytrading the NDX for about 10 months over a
good DSL connection.
I'm pretty happy with IB. All I want them to do is give me the
bid/ask and get me in and out reliably ASAP. They do a pretty
good job of this.
Fills are generally 2 seconds or less.
IB has also stated that they are reducing commissions next month.
They have also stated that they are releasing a new, java based
client next month.
They send you a statement by email each day. Very nice. I have
never seen a mistake in these statements.
You can get IB support people on the phone in about 3 minutes on
average. They have brokers you can call to trade if the system is
down. The wait for a broker is usually longer than for a support
person.
But there are occasional problems
Their service has connection problems that come and go. The
general trend has been towards fewer connection problems over
time. Lately I have lost connection about 4 times a week. The
average loss is about 2 minutes per time. The connection losses
tend to occur in clusters. I do not believe these are ISP related
as other web apps continue to function.
Until recently their bid/ask/last update speed has been very
good. This seems to have changed recently. I do not believe this
is an ISP issue as it occurs at exactly the time the market
activity reaches intraday peaks. It is possible they have reached
the point where their bandwidth is saturated by customers. A few
times this week updates were so slow that I could not trust the
information for timing entries and exits. For the first time
since using their system I am getting bad fills, which I believe
is because the ticker is behind when I pull the trigger. I
mentioned this to their support people who claimed to have no
knowledge of this but made no effort to look into the issue.
IB support people are quite fond of blaming your ISP for any
problem you have. I have had to seriously argue with them to get
problems that have nothing to do with an ISP straightened out
because of this. They will not talk to your ISP in any case.
IB makes you acknowledge that they are not responsible for losses
caused by any fault on their part before trading with them. The
most significant drawdown I have experienced in my account with
them was a direct result of one such failure. As a result I have
a backup account with Lind, where I know I can get a broker on
the phone to hedge if need be.
Even such hedging may be impossible. Their software sometimes
drops open orders.
For example, I placed a short at market order on Thursday. The
order was received by IB then disappeared from my screen. At this
point I had no idea what my status was. I called support and
after 20 minutes on the phone they told me that the order was
sent to GLOBEX, which dropped it. They believed the order was not
filled but would not confirm this. So I went through the entire
day not knowing whether I had an open short order or not. Quite
some time ago, I heard a similar story from someone who traded
options through IB. He said the fill finally showed up on his
statement 2 days later.
I forget the exact details of this... but in another instance an
order was filled but the reporting was dropped in such a way that
I appeared to have a short position when none existed. This
discrepancy made it impossible to place any long trades the
remainder of that day. Support people could not seem to get it
through their heads that this was a bug in the software. I do not
believe any effort was made to report this to the engineers.
Problems like the two described above seem to crop up about once
a month.
regards,
tbr
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