I'm surprised that this thread, with IB in the title, hell with "Closing my IB account" being the title, and currently 7 pages long, hasn't enticed Def to jump in yet. I'd be real interested in his perspective on this.
Too bad IB couldn't blame the Nasdaq today like most firms do. You go down, you better pay up sucker!!!
IB does a great deal of institutional and program trading. It will be interesting to see if and how the other customers besides retail were affected. Are they on separate server farms, backups, connections? Anyone knows?
as a general rule institutional quality brokers not only have backups, they have backups for their backups. maybe that explains why retail gets screwed whenever IB has a problem. it's all hands on deck for the whales with the special phone number.
outages are expected, but customer service should at least be ablee to exit a position. I'm not talking about traders whining about missed opportunity, I'm talking about traders being stuck in positions, even though they had stop orders in.