IB had several Globex outages this morning and it took me ten minutes to get a rep. on the phone. I may have to start checking out some other brokers if they dont get their act together pretty quick. Low commissions are nice but they are not everything.
jTrader about 98% stable, good support, min acct size is $7500 BESt about 99.99%, extremely quick support, min acct $4000 intraday margins for mini sp about $1100 for mini nas about $1600 overnight is exchange minimum. Would love to prove that sometimes a couple of dollars in this business may equal much more than the straight math of x round turns X the diff. in commissions.
Elon: Here is the quote from the pop-up on your site, which seems to vary slightly from your earlier post: "Base comission rates for mini Nasdaq and and mini S&P for active accounts are $6.95* per side. CTA's, money managers and institutions can expect lower rates based on volume and account size. * Commissions per side do not include the customary National Futures Association, Exchange, and Brokerage fees. " Thus, it appears $13.90 r/t, plus fees. The earlier post said $8 r/t, inclusive of fees (JTrader)
I do not want to sound cynical, but I have done this "jumping around" from futures brokerages many times in the past. No one really compares with IB on price. If you could find another brokerage that did not have actual brokers running the firm, you might find a place that could compete, but I don't see anyone touching their $4.80(r/t)... That being said, I realize that anyone who trades a decent sized account and/or likes to scalp the es with leverage is currently in an ENORMOUS bind with these guys...In my opinion, one day is one thing, but when it happens four days in a row at approximately the same time, threatening to keep traders "locked in" overnight, this is a huge problem... Alot of people try and argue with this, "well I am happy to pay $3-$4 more per r/t for the customer service." Assuming someone does about 10 trades per day or 200 per month, that is another $600-$800 per month or $7k-$10k per year...These numbers ADD UP. Granted, if you are strictly a position trader than this is not such a concern, but for everyone else it is... My solution is to simply keep the IB acct and use a second account with a minumum amount of money, just enough to be able to offset any trades that are "locked in" on the IB TWS...This way I am able to still benefit from their great workstation and their low commissions...
Vulture_getting a backup broker is exactly what I did 6 months ago. AND after switching among three "backup" brokers I came to realize that IB is without a doubt the BEST OVERALL BROKER. However the nature of this business makes it impossible to depend on any one trading platform.
re this IB and back up - if IB does go down and it is not a Globex problem - wht does happen? - if you phone them - can you not get thrugh to them to close the postiion - they say they do not charge if it is their system which is down
Not getting charged is last on your mind. They run their orders through the same servers you run your orders through. So if you are down they are down. The only time calling them will help is if you are having a hardware problem with your modem or computer and IB's system is up.