Greetings, I've been a member here for a bit and browse on occasion. I just wanted to give people a heads up. I'm not sure how many this will affect on the board but I hope it helps. Apologies if this is in the wrong forum. My firm uses IB's cost-plus (unbundled) commission structure for trading in our client accounts, as we regularly achieve a trading volume in the millions of shares a month and, when combined with getting liquidity rebates, can reduce effective rates well below 0.003/ share. Anyway, I recently noticed that for a particular ETF (QQQ), the commissions my clients were charged by were greater than what my trade platform calculates they should have been. After some digging and confirmation with IB chart, it turns out this was due to an error in IB's programming, and one which they quickly rectified. It turns out that for all NASDAQ / ISLAND MOC orders, the exchange fee is 0.001 / share (which is what I was using), but IB was charging the full 0.003 / share fee for removing liquidity. Like I said, IB quickly rectified the error and I am in the process of crediting my client accounts for the difference, but I wanted to make others aware of this so that if they were affected they can pursue compensation. While I may have certain frustrations with the way IB does things, I will say they were very quick to address this problem, admit fault, and fix it. So if you trade unbundled at IB and trade using MOC orders on ISLAND or NASDAQ, then please be aware of this issue. Also, it's good to sample your charged commissions vs correct commissions because you never know when the broker may be getting things wrong. I hope this helps.
For us it was happening for as long as we had traded QQQ unbundled. QQQ is the only ISLAND ETF our strategies trade, but every trade we had made in it since unbundling had commissions overcharged. When speaking with their rep on the phone, I asked her if they had any intention of alerting customers who may have been affected by this. She wasn't sure, but a $0.002/share difference can add up over time and volume. I'm also not sure if IB sent the extra exchange fees to ISLAND or pocketed the difference. I can't stress the importance of sampling your actual commission charges vs what they should be. This may have been an honest mistake, but it still cost my clients money.
I think some of you are finally figuring this out. You think they don't know/didn't know that they were overcharging by 200%?! That's a HUGE difference. They know. They have enough checks and balances to figure out something isn't right. I still don't trust IB. Period.
Well you can bet your ass any normal company who had any common sense wouldn't even need to THINK to come up with the answer to that question. Why wouldn't you alert customers? If I ran a company and found out I was ripping people off by accident you can bet i'd be on the horn making sure every one of them knew I screwed up and I owe them THEIR money. That's just good business practice. " Not sure?" !...... I'm not sure I understand where the confusion comes in.
You think a doctor alerts a patient when he has committed malpractice? Heck no, his medical teams gets busy on the cover up.