1. I don't trade during US hours so I didn't have any problems when you guys did. My servers and exchanges performed flawlessly (is this symptomatic of the whole US economy/dollar thing - are you guys going down the tube??) 2. Wrong on numbers by an order of magnitude. Count them (you can do it with a cleverly setup google search). I've posted a couple lately but thats just because we've got into a stupid ratings cycle again. Its fun to wind idiots up. Lets be realistic about problems with IB though ... I actually understand networks, computers, and have realistic expectations of brokers ... so I have few "stupid" problems. And thus, I find IB excellent. And they even give me great service - from how they treat me I should be giving them 5 so I'll do that next time I give them a review
I've seen this remark posted a numbers of times and I'd bet just about anything that it is not correct. The problem is that it is not just a matter of waving a magic wand, forking out some dollars and you get 100% up time. These systems are complex and there are all sorts of failure modes, some of which may not have been forseen by the system designers and some of which are just too expensive to design for. Try out a couple of failure scenarios. Single computer room/data centre but all systems in data centre and its connectivity are redundant. Fire in computer room means the whole lot is shut down. As a customer are you prepared to pay for the cost of a second data centre replicating everything in the first one ? I recall an incident in Sydney quite a number of years ago where a nut case got loose with an axe in the understreet telecoms cabling and took out a lot of the telecoms to the CBD. It's hard (and expensive) to design for that kind of thing. These might be extreme cases, but they are illustrative of the difficulties of achieving 100% up time and even more so within a specific budget. Engineering is all about designing to a budget. Nobody here (except IB reps) knows what that IB infrastructure looks like, and I would guess that IB considers that information commercially confidential. But to suggest that there are not large measures of redundancy is almost certainly wrong. The bottom line is that as customers, making suppositions about IB infrastructure is not very useful. The only thing that counts is the level of service availability. IB don't do themselves any favours by not ensuring that the system status page is always up to date and accurate. It's been said before, but risk management has got to take into account system failures whether at brokerage, exchange, internet, or your trading computer(s), power supply etc.
Quite interesting that you didn't actually get around to answering my question... To the guy above kiwi's post, I don't think kiwi is a bad guy at all. I am with him in the sense that I now realize that 90% of the posts that bitch about IB are bogus. 10% are legit.
A couple of comments. Yes, the ax-wielding maniac example is extreme. That's like 'meteor crashes into building where main server is housed and simultaneously another one crashes into building where backups are housed'. I wouldn't expect them to be able to deal with that. I do want to point out that my statement was simply that IB does not have redundancy at this time. We can split hairs about what the term means but 45 minutes of system wide blackout means that they don't have redundancy, IMO. When I say redundancy, I mean if there is a system wide outage, you can get things up and running in a few minutes. That's good enough for me. Now the question is - do we expect redundancy out of a broker and what other businesses/organizations have it? Well, as you will probably agree, there are systems within the realm of the financial data processing world that have it. And yes, it means whatever, a data farm in a separate room/building/city/country. Am I willing to pay what would be necessary to have such redundancy with my broker? Since my account is small compared to the big players, I probably couldn't afford it, so that point is well taken. Let's forget about 100% uptime for a moment. So the IB servers go down on Friday. Fine, we don't expect 100% uptime. What is a reasonable period of downtime? I can assure you that there are traders out there who lost a lot of money, for whom the actual 45 minutes was not reasonable. Am I an IT guy? Nope. But do I believe that there is a way for them to take some of their profits and make sure that if the worst happens and they have a sudden system wide outage, that they can set up something where they can get people access to execution until they get the problems sorted out, and do it in less than 45 minutes? You're damn straight I believe they could. In the end my take on it was that the entire system going down has to happen at some point in time. 45 minutes to get it back up and running is not ideal and IB should be able to do much better, even taking into account their IT budget. Does IB have a somewhat idiosyncratic take on tech issues?Well, they are in a tech business. But let's look at TWS. Even IB patriots like kiwi and OldTrader have agreed that IB is more interested in tweaking obscure aspects of TWS than making it a completely rock-solid platform. I get pinkouts all the time, but they don't last. Is this acceptable? The only other ongoing complaint about IB that has any validity, IMO, is the one about TWS and how they are always releasing new versions which don't work. I am aware that the company clear xx % of all the trades in yy market. Do they know tech? Clearly they do. I bet they have different setups for their biggest customers. Another aspect of it is one of two things that resonate in all the bogus complaints I hear about IB - their attitude is 'We aren't going to tell you anything'. Now, if you are in trouble and you go see a lawyer, you know what the lawyer tells you? 'Under no circumstances are you to admit anything'. So this is understandable. It's also a drag for clients. You seem to agree. In fact IB told me that the problem was not theirs - the guy I spoke to told me it was 'an internet problem'. Obviously that was a load of crap. IB know their business. If they had mass migrations of customers who told them, as they were walking out the door, 'I'm leaving because TWS sucks' or 'I'm leaving because you have too much downtime', then they would do something about it. Do you agree? The fact that they don't means either 1) The problems aren't bad enough to cause mass migrations or 2) There aren't any other viable choices in the marketplace. In Canada, 2) is definitely correct - there aren't any other firms that offer what IB does. But 1) is also substantially correct, at least in my experience and so far. I would like to know if Advantage Futures has ever had a 45 minute blackout in the history of the company. I traded there for a while and I am betting that the answer is no.
Actually you will almost certainly find that they do have redundancy. And it normally meets your objectives for 95% or more of the customer base on 95% or more of the fault events. You will also find that a fire or an axe probably wouldn't have achieved the friday event (that pleasantly didn't affect me ) The problem with a real time trading system is that all elements are and need to be interacting - they are not genuinely independent. Many faults would have occurred last year that met or bettered your objectives for service restoration. But occasionally a tricky one happens where sometimes even your redundancy works against you ... and then your restoration depends on how tricky and how good the guys diagnosing and testing it are. LOL ... re Nik's unanswered question. No relationship other than a satisfied customer. I poke the whingers here for a few reasons: - I enjoy it. - Many of them are just so stupid I just can't resist (can't be bothered I suppose). - IB are a good broker (almost all of the time) for customers who have a clue. They've also done a good job of enhancing TWS in ways I've asked for and fault finding when I've pointed out real problems. I, like many others, have years of service from IB and thousands of trades with virtually no problems. I unlike most of the whingers have also had a number of other brokers so I lack a naive view of brokerages, the internet, and technology, and know enough not to trip over my own issues. PS. I also hope that some of the whingers will get so pissed off with my prodding them that they go to other brokers (those who are really IB customers) as they're high maintenance and I'd like IB to focus on keeping costs low, speed up, and technology advancing for me
This weeks incident was nothing, i can imagine outages that might last several hours, meaning your market might even be closed when IB comes back up, you need to be able handle such events. Look at the Exchanges. I started trading on Liffe eight months ago, in that time they have had two outages lasting several hours each, also ecbot goes down often, even Globex has had intraday outages on some instruments..
Does anyone know approx. how many (%) of IB users were affected the other day? Was it system wide? They run a huge MM biz...was this affected? Are they doing anything to make good on losses do to stops getting hit etc? I think they had an issue in germany a while back with some market manipulation, and the ceo made good to several customers who lost money on that crap. IB is a huge beast, making tons of loot, and are picking up tons more customers marketing their 14+% price improvement stats. Every DAB has issues. It does seem though that IB has bigger issues, that affect far more users, and last for longer times than most others. I have wanted to at the very least open up an IB account, at least as a second account, for the sheer fact that they have access to almost every major exchange world wide. I have to agree that currently I couldn't see switching to IB as a sole broker, and that bothers me that the biggest player in the game is not the most reliable player in the game for users.
BTW a few weeks ago globex was printing crude offers $5 bucks below market. people were going nuts on globex and ice, and there were several trades that ended up getting busted.
All firms will have downtime. What makes IB's worse when they happen is their more complete reliance on computers and relatively few customer service employees. With many low-cost brokers, if their system goes down you can call them up and have them exit or manage your positions. Friday at IB though, if you could even get anybody on the line, they could only tell you that they don't know what's going on or when it'll be fixed. There are advantages to using IB, but be advised that their outages are more severe and potentially more dangerous than most of its competitors.