I used Interactive Brokers and they had issues with the e-mini, in ohuse. I lost over $5,000 and the guy there said that is ashame, but we are not responsible, which is what you agreed to when you signed up. He was right, but let me tell you, savign a couple dollars on future trades is not worth it, when you can lose it all PLUS on a system failure. DO NOT USE THEIR SERVICE if you have a lot of money in the market.
if their system went down for an extended time, first you should call the main office to have them get you out of any positions- but i hear ya- systems failures are a bitch- if it is totally their fault and their system was down for a few hours- raise hell- get your $$$ back- tell them that you will raise hell and flame them publicly all over ET and other sites......but, if you lost money because you made some dumb trades and the system worked, welcome to wall street......
Here's another side: IB had an outage on the emini's at the end of last month. I think it lasted somewhere between 15-30 minutes. I had an order in, and cancelled it as the system went down. I did not know if I had an open position. I went chat with a representative to check if my cancellation went through or not. It took probably 10 or 15 minutes to find out. Actually if I remember right TWS came back up about the same time. Turns out my cancel made it, but it was nerve racking. I received and e-mail a couple days later saying they were going to refund the first $1000 of my commissions this month. I know I could have lost more than that, but that's the risk you take. This was unexpected, they really didn't have to do it, but it made me feel like they at least cared and were taking it seriously. I know over 400 people got the same thing. That means they rebated over $400,000 by choice. I thought it was pretty good of them. -JPB
It's all part of the game. Know what to expect and plan accordingly. It's all over ET that if you have technical problems with IB it may take days to learn what your position is and that it's nearly impossible to get someone on the phone. Got to expect it if you use them. Low prices, low service.
Use a different broker, pay more, and be able to execute and verify your positions over the phone in a matter of minutes. I can't fathom getting into a leveraged position while knowing that it will take 15-20 minutes to talk to someone if things go awry and a day or two to find out "if it worked". You've got to be kidding.
I'm always suspicious of a low number of posts when there is vehement pro or con about a broker or other service. This guy has 1 post to his name.