Headaches with Interactive Brokers

How do you deal with a broker with overnight access that won't accept overnight trades? And then executes those trades at the market open when you've already assured yourself that the trades had been rejected. I was planning to move a chunk of my trading account there but their retail software is so opaque that you can only guess at what transactions will take place.

They reject all my overnight trades then execute them when I’m not looking. Even when I cancel the trades, they execute them anyway. Thanks, guys, for the $1,300 loss this morning on a trade Interactive Brokers flagged as rejected and didn’t show up as a pending order.

If they weren't a slave ship for low cost trading, their software interface wouldn't pass a merchantability test. I do like some unique functionality they have, but I can't live with trades being executed without my awareness. That's happened five times in my first two months there.

 

Did you use a Limit order and check the boxes that specify Good Till Canceled and Fill Outside RTH's?

 

In today's wrestling match I tried all of those things, though I'm not sure which were invoked on which pass. I'm asking IB to send me documentation for each of the attempts I made.

 

I had same problem until I noticed there is a separate, 3rd box for overnight trading.

 

Most probably you did something wrong and lack understanding about "overnight trading" (whatever that is). If you provided the symbol it would be possible to answer your question (by a simple search that only cost a few seconds).

But I can imagine it's too market sensitive info to disclose the stock you want to trade overnight. The solution could be not to tell if you want to long or short (so we're still in the blind). On the other hand it seems unfriendly not to disclose long or short info to the same people taking the time to answer your question...

 

I Trade through IB... Absolutely agree with you about their Charting Screens & Charting Tools & Chart Interfaces been very substandard.... and even agree IB has a very poorly designed Trade Execution Software system.

But I have executed thousands of trades pre-market and post market throught IB by designating them as AFTER HOURS TRADES with the checkboxes they provide during order creation and transmission.

Also if you have IBKR Lite... your are restricted, pre mkt and post mkt, to fewer hours of opportunity... IBKR pro allows full pre mkt and post mkt opportunity trading by time.