Now Universal Account is in effect from June 24. Check today's IB communique in its homepage Great News! Cheers
So if you have a universal account do you have to pay market data fees for all exchanges? Could get exoensive if so!
No you have not. IB's Universal Account is a much-better implementation than you have conceived. Read it yourself IB's June 21st Communiqué. Quoted below for your convenience: "In conjunction with the Universal account, we are no longer requiring customers to receive their real-time market data through Interactive Brokers. Trading Permissions have been separated from Market Data Subscriptions, and you may trade without market data, or receive market data without trading permissions. In addition, the US non-professional securities market data bundle now includes ACE and Globex Futures."
But how do you trade a market without realtime bid/ask in tws? I read that to mean you can trade a market but have to get the prices from another source
I think without streaming bid/ask updates you can still place limit orders by manually keying in the limit prices, though tedious, time-consuming and inefficient - but some people won't care so much (as to the exchange fees spent) depending on their trading style, and it will have no influence on market and stop orders.
IB doesn't say you can upgrade from your existing account though, is it available to all customers yet?
kicking, it seems you will be able to upgrade.. this is from the communique : " Beginning Monday June 24th at 9 am ET, you may either open a new Universal Account from Open an Account, or convert an existing account to a Universal Account from the Account Login menu. Account conversion requests will be processed in batch over the weekend to avoid trading disruptions."