If IB is hedging your position as counterparty to your trade, isn't it to their advantage to have an outage during a strong move and let their customer's positions get stopped out? This let's IB and others cover their position at a better gain. This looks like exactly what happened from 2:57PM to 3:22 EST on the stock indexes (Mar 04 08). 2:57 was right around the point where at 1315-1320 on the ES where the morning shorts ATR stops will start to kick in. It also helps them if they don't answer their phone during that outage
You don't need to know the future to know that the downtrend had ended around 2:30 PM, but not enough of a reversal to cover.
Your saying that they are going to ruin their whole retail business for a small gain. Don't think so.
You be surprised how much they make from the retail business and how much they make from being market makers. There will always be new customers and these alleged practices are impossible to proved.
It is true that they make much more off of market making than in retail brokerage but the conspiracy theory they caused the outage to front run customers is probably a little out there. As I said earlier, IB has been unstable all day today not just at 2:30 and after.
A bullshit thread. Engineering outages is NOT in IB's interest -- they are in the fast cheap and reliable game. If IB really wanted to make money from customers they just have to select all you losers and take the opposite side of every trade. Even if you have a winning day your 8 mates will have losers. When you start to win then they offset your trades. Thats what spreadbetter's do (except that if you win on very short term trades they kick you out. Sounds liike a Casino doesn't it?
IB was unstable for some throughout the day, but for most it was from 2:57PM to 3:23 EST, the bulk of the PM move. I am sure if IB has nothing to hide, they would not mind the CFTC examine their server log for today.
Correction on the outage. After analysis of my connection log, this occurred at 14:53 to 15:15; still the bulk of the afternoon move. I have no dog in this fight other than not able to enter a trade with IB during this period. I was already long with Tradestation and Zenfire feed, both of which did not miss a beat all day. Those traders who were injured in this trade and feel like IB contributed to the failure of their trade should contact the CFTC with any suspicious activity: http://www.cftc.gov/customerprotect...reportinformationtous/complaintform/index.htm Code: 3/4/2008 15:15 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=Connected 3/4/2008 14:53 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=ConnectionLost 3/4/2008 14:33 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=Connected 3/4/2008 14:32 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=ConnectionLost 3/4/2008 13:53 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=Connected 3/4/2008 13:53 Connection IB: Primary connection=Connected Price feed=ConnectionLost