I'm a software QA engineer and I've been with IB for over 4 years. In the meantime, I stumbled over the occasional issue with their web site, or bug in TWS. Dutifully, I took the time and pain to take screenshots (even video screencasts several times) that showed the problem, and reported in detail the issues to IB via the Message Center. Again, I'm a QA engineer, I know what I'm talking about, and I sent in precise bug reports, not "X doesn't work!!1". Not once did I get a reply like "Thanks for reporting this, it's broken, and we'll fix it". No. I was asked for screenshots when I already sent screencasts; I was told "Thank you for your input, We will take it under consideration for future enhancements to our web site." when all they had to do was edit a line or two on a specific web page that I provided the URL for. I was told they couldn't reproduce the problem when I could reproduce it on multiple computers with several version of the standalone or web-based TWS. Why does IB do this? Don't they realize that user feedback is valuable, and that users will stop reporting issues if they're being ignored? Have you guys managed to get acknowledgements when you reported that something was wrong? How did you do it?
I had two accounts with them and each time I was frozen out of the TWS. They told me the solution to my problem was to close my accounts. And today they sent me an email telling me about all their new bull shit. How special.
I have complained about several issues, mostly TWS bugs or undesireable changes in an update, and eventually the issues were resolved. When it's been something blatantly erroneous in the code, such as the recent problem where using dropdown menus on the main TWS page was causing erratic unintentional scrolling of the entire page, it usually gets fixed pretty quickly (measured in weeks). But otherwise it can take a very long time. Another recent one was they'd shrunken the chart axis number font size on one of the updates with no adjustment possible. Eventually they made the numbers legible again, and user-adjustable. But that one took months to resolve. Overall I think they do try to continually improve things and accomodate most (popular) requests. But it's almost always at the expense of time wasted becoming familar with the updates or working around new problems that arise with all these changes. The thing I keep harping on is the fact that sometimes "old and familiar" is better than "new and evolving" when you're talking about the best tools to use in such a competitive and high stakes endeavor as trading. I wish IB would work on FIXES ONLY and let the changes be for just a year or two.
several times: I have found tech support (the ones you call) to be near-useless, and filing bug reports near-useless. However, the live chat with the API team works very well and I've gotten several things fixed and/or considered. I haven't done it in at least a year, though. I have found that being constructive and helpful get you a long further than complaining. If you do serious volume, you'll also be taken significantly more serious and get to talk to the engineers.
During the 11 years I have been a client of IB, I have had great success working with IB software engineers fixing issues and bugs. They take their TWS platform seriously and have fixed problems within a day for some problems. For less serious problems it my take longer to get a problem fixed. I find it all depends on what level within IB's software design group the problem is kicked up to. If it gets kicked up to the head of the department and several software people are working on resolving a problem it does not take long to get a fix. I have had cases during the last 11 years where the head of the software design group would sit on the phone line with me while he was talking to people within his group trying to solve a problem I had reported. None of the other brokers I have used have worked as hard to fix and update their trading software.
It shouldn't need to be "fixed and updated" so often though. Get a solid working platform and leave it alone so traders can concentrate on trading "on automatic". I'll bet if IB polled its clients a good 85% would say they'd prefer after IB fixes all the bugs that they leave TWS alone for a year or more.
What would be more meaningful would be the commissions produced by the customer responding to the poll versus their update preference. IB has a commercial side which I believe provides TWS as a "white label" platform to some commercial users as well as just providing the trading capability to others. We retail customers are important, but how important? Jack
new account login page- what "remember settings" check box is for? to remember the password or username? or both? .didn't work for me,using firefox. what "English" is for? it's in English already. make no sense.
I have said this before and more than once but if you held a contest to see who would write the most convulted, buggy, ungliest, least funtional trading software they would not come close to IB. It's amazingly bad. Work of Art almost.