Never as bad as the one this friday. They have pinkouts, where you can still pull data, but temporarily cant place an order, though your placed orders are still in force. I have had 2 pinkouts over the past 2 months. April was a bad month for pinkouts.... Otherwise smooth sailing. If it was horrible, Id jump ship and RUN AWAY. Every Online broker I have had has had issues along this line. Nothing new, nothing spectacular. Servers go down. PERIOD....
No. It's just that so many people use them, esp. here, that when it does go out, then the cry about it is rather loud.
Overall very good platform. In 2007 I passed them hundreds of equity trades via API, and I can't recall a single problem with connectivity or fills. Any errors were human. Mine. Let's hope for continued volatility and profitablity in 2008.
lol.... well, aside from that one small problem last Friday. To the OP. there are intermittent connectivity isues with TWS, but mostly the pinkouts referred to above. I have only had an IB account for about 3 months but I have never had the platform go down like it did on Friday. My personal opinion is that more than one of those a year is too many. All the explanations as to why it happened are moot. Either you have redundancy or you don't. IB does not, at this time. If the OP is thinking about opening an account at IB, I would suggest he do so. I waited for a long time because of all the crap I read here, and in the end, IB is working fine and gives me exactly what I need. I am opening a backup account at another broker as a result of Friday's events and everyone with any significant amount of money with IB should probably do the same. kiwi, you're nothing if not consistent. Saying that there were no problems in 2007, days after a huge system wide outage is... how shall I describe it... well, I won't say dishonest, I'll say optimistic, how's that? If you don't mind, can I ask you a perfectly serious question? I noticed that among the 200 odd ratings of IB in the broker ratings, you have posted something like 35 of them. An honest question, not a flame at all. Are you paid or otherwise compensated by IB to stick up for them here?
Trader: No, Kiwi is not listed in the Shill Registry(updated 12/30/07). Kiwi is ok. Sometimes helps others on ET. BTW: At least one of the other DAB's that advertise here had an outage that lasted for hours a few months ago, I think. Shit WILL happen - no doubt about it.