After todays debacle I am going to close my IB account at months end. I typically generate $10,000 in commissions per month. Today luckily I only lost a few hundred bucks because the system was down and I could not get through to customer service because of busy signals. The system was down 50 minutes during a busy part of the day. I am lucky I did not lose thousands of dollars. I emailed management to get a rebate for my losses and this was their response: "As you know when an outage occures and you can not trade when you want to, the market can go in your favor or against you. Indeed, as it happens many people who suffer such losses, ans some more who only claim that they do, would like us to pay them , but never one who benefits offers to pay us. Had we followed that policy we would have gone out of business long ago." My response was, "with that type of customer service you will go out of business." Hmmm good business decision, "Lose a $10,000/month commission generator instead of rebating a few hundred bucks." And thanks for telling me that the market can go either way and I could have benefited from the outage. Thats not the point. The point is I want to be able to react to the direction of the market and I cant do it if the system is down and I cannot phone in an order. I dont want any freebies. Needless to say I gave retail trading a shot and was very dissappointed. I am back on the market for a prop shop and will be looking for low commissions, excellent customer service, and reliable systems.
if u r such a big trader who generates $10000/mo in commission, you must know how to minimize your loss by simultaneously placing stops and you dont trade big amount during nonmarket hour. I agree with the weakness in IB's customer support department, but hope it will do better in the days ahead. In the past few weeks it has introduced many innovative features in its TWS. Let's also see the positive aspects of IB.
Seeing as how you generate 10,000 in commission, you must be a big player. Now, I've read that no matter who your broker is, you should always have a backup account. Do you have such an account. Ofcourse, this means splitting your trading capital, but it does hedge against the risk of one broker going down. You can always offset the position in the other account in an emergency, and protect against losses.
Yowza. Ten grand a month??? With that kind of commission bill, you could have a $250,000 account and would still need to make 48% a year just to cover your nut! That's slave labor... illegal immigrant berry pickers don't get jacked that bad....
I didn't mean to imply that $10K wasn't a lot of money. I just meant that I can see that $10K/month in commish would be expected by someone that was daytrading some size in the eminis.
i assumed he meant stocks as he would not be trading that much size at IBs futures prices, its on the edge, but i am sure he could get lower commish - would not stop the breakdowns though - but he might get a freindly voice to soothe the pain p.s i bet he's had a few emails from some freindly and helpful brokers! p.p.s maybe a post like that is a great way to get your commish down!!