It's a general procedure to make a large obnoxious firm start dancing if they try to f*** you over. I did it to a belligerent oil company and it ended up costing them $50,000 to pay their lawyers when they could have rectified the entire problem with $300 to put a muffler on their pump that was shaking my house
Hi comagnum, thanks for your suggestion(s), but unfortunately it's not helping. I had already tried several browsers, including the ones on an iPad and an Android tablet. Clearing cache also didn't change anything. Thank you, it seems I could use some luck with this, I also wish you best of luck wherever you might need it.
Hello Steve, thanks for your advice, but it sounds rather complicated to me. I've never done anything with ChatGPT so far. And I also know very little about legal issues. It does seem however something is needed to incentivize them to rectify the problem, because thus far they don't seem very motivated to do something about it. But I shall give them a call again, and who knows maybe this time I will get to speak to someone who's actually going to solve this issue... I shall find out soon enough.
Hi M.W., thank you too for your suggestion, but you see I don't want to close my positions, it's the opposite of what I want. I am very much concerned that I will be forced to close my positions if the market keeps moving against me. I am trading on margin and my excess liquidity is getting uncomfortably low, I'm moving closer towards a margin call. That's why I need access to my account management urgently. Because I want to be able to add funds to my account to prevent a margin call from happening. Trading is not a problem. I can still trade, buy and sell everything normally in TWS.
... Hence why you should have the positions requested to be closed NOW, not when everything goes against you. The first lesson every junior at a trading desk learns is to immediately flatten exposure when out of control.
Hello ktm, I myself have been with IB for a long time and I totally agree with you that their technology is close to 100% of the time really good. But you're right it really feels right now as if I am in a tiny little box from which I might never escape anymore. I can only hope that either @def or someone else at IB will help me with this. I just can't understand how IB can do such a thing. I mean blocking your access to so many important functionalities just because you have to fill out a questionnaire about market data which they say you still have 4 weeks time (until November 24) to do. If IB wants to present the questionnaire whenever I sign into account management, that's totally fine by me, but give me an option to skip it (especially when some error occurs), so that I can do it later and move on to other parts of account management which I urgently need to go to. Anyways, thank you for your reply, I appreciate it.
Hi ZBZB, thank you for your suggestion. I tried that, but it didn't help at all. I tried to do this on an iPad, my pc and an Android tablet, but there's no difference whatsoever. It gives me the exact same error message. Maybe I could still try to use my old BlackBerry smartphone, I will do that later on, but I don't think it will make any difference.
I'm sorry but I don't really understand your logic, I mean I don't want to close my positions at all. I never intended to close them, I am always monitoring my positions carefully and when necessary I will deposit more money into my account. When I do have access to account management, it's very easy to do. It only takes a couple of minutes after which I can transfer the money from my bank account. With most of my positions I am at a loss right now and with others... well I've price targets and I don't want to sell everything I have just because IB decided to block access to my account management because of a not really important and most certainly not urgent questionnaire. IB said in an e-mail I need to have it filled out before November 24, that was still 4 weeks away yesterday. Failing to do so would not have a disasterous outcome, I would no longer be able to get North American market data anymore. Although that's of course really very annoying, it wouldn't be the end of the world. And I assume that as soon as I would see that I had no market data anymore I could still fill out the questionnaire and get access to this market data again. Now what if I did what you suggest. Suggest I am going to sell all my positions and let's say as an example they are valued at $100.000. Then what if these positions would actually be very close to a bottom and they would turn around and rise substantially? I mean I would miss out on a lot of money then. Suggest it takes IB one more week to give me back access to account management and suggest that by then the positions I would have sold are now worth $110.000. What should I do then? Will IB give me $10.000 in compensation? I don't think so! Wait for them to come down again? Which they might. If I buy my positions back right away I have a loss of $10.000 just because IB did something this stupid. If I wait for the positions to get back to $100.000 and they would, I would have no damages, but if I would be waiting for my positions to get back to $100K value, and they wouldn't but instead they would keep climbing for perhaps a few years even. Then I might miss out on let's say $200.000. That seems a little bit expensive to me for not having had access to my account management for about a week. Of course I understand that there is this risk that if I do not sell and I won't get access to account management in time, and therefore I wouldn't be able to deposit funds in time, I could be forced to sell my positions for even less. But according to my logic that's not my fault. If IB hadn't blocked access to account management I would have been able to fund my account in time and I could have kept my positions. I believe IB should NEVER block access towards such critical functionalities. Why block access to customer support because you can't complete a questionnaire for whatever reason? Why should it be impossible to access and download your statements? I can't look into the future, all I know is that quite a few of the positions that I have are already down by so much. And of course they can always go lower, they could all go to zero. But they could also be really undervalued by now and soon take off. I don't know how long it will last before I will have access again to account management and when I will be able to deposit more money. I don't know what will happen next week with the markets. The Fed, the geopolitical situation etc. Basically there's uncertainty and risk, keeping my positions or selling them right now can both lead to financial losses. My point still is that if IB wouldn't block access to account management I could fund my account all the way to zero if I choose to. And it should be my choice.
Assuming no material omissions in your claim. Call the AFM on Monday when they open. Griping here is a waste of energy. Let us know what happens.
This is not an idiotic thing but something that's required by the exchanges to determine your user status in order to determine the data fee structure that you pay. If you are a "non-professional member" which is just a regular investor who uses the data purely for yourself, then you pay a much lower fee to access the data of the exchanges but if you are considered a "professional" member meaning that you actually use data not just for yourself but actually use it to manage money for others or for any kind of business, then you are supposed to pay a much higher data fee. Every single broker is required to collect updated user status from time to time for all of their clients, not just IB. The only problem with this is IB's not able to receive your information and as a result barring you from using their system. That's concerning. And this problem is clearly on IB's end and not yours. IB's portal ever since it's upgraded to the new format to use context-sensitive IB bots, it's been very hiccupy to say the least. You would be stuck sometimes using the most routine functionalities it's really annoying. I would continue to hound IB until the problem is resolved. It does take a while with IB sometimes and you need to be really persistent.