Well, IB replied again to me, and this time their version of what happened is that I was only charged once for all the data feeds, and the reports I was seeing where it was showing me paying twice - were the result of a “display error”. Not sure how a transaction-by-transaction log could have previously had erroneous deductions over the period of a year, which were all somehow mysteriously removed, and in the end have the same cash balance as before though.... whatever, it’s like 50 bucks. I’ll just keep a close eye on the reports more frequently from now on I guess.
Simple, take your starting balance from 5 months prior and ending balance in that month. Then try to work out what you paid for market data. Then compare with the statement.
It is interesting that Baron has a whole forum section devoted to this sort of thing. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/forums/ib-technical-issues.92/ IB is a basket case of oddballishness.
Or perhaps because ib holds 5000% more accounts of ET members and lurkers than other less popular brokers? It's like hearing about mechanical complaints about Mercedes cars on the internet vs Citroën.
To be honest, I don't even know how to find out what my cash balance should have been 5 months ago, much less at any particular specific time with IB. As far as I can tell, any and all "statements" are to be generated on-demand with their report-generation tool. There aren't static/pdf monthly statements that are mailed or made available on the website anywhere as far as I can tell. In my particular case, with several dozens of positions always open, dividends hitting all the time, frequent deposits to my account, fees coming out for data feeds all the time, a hand full of trades per day, etc, it's extremely complicated to be able to tell what my cash balance "should have been" at any particular/specific time. And now that I can see that IB can "do things" to "fix display errors" that cause line items to be deleted (retroactively?) from this day-by-day accounting of "Statement of Funds" reports that you generate on-demand -- I don't know of a reasonable way of piecing anything together.... and to be honest, for the $50 or so in what appeared to be (and might have actually been?) erroneous data subscription fees, it's not really worth my time to do a full audit. However, I do think that it would be very prudent going forward to generate and save monthly statements for myself at the end of each month, for the most recent (and possibly older) months, and "compare" the output to make sure nothing has changed. I guess I was naive to just think it would be sufficient to be able to generate any report at any time with IB's website, and assume that data "back in time" would never be changed out from under me.
Are you sure about this? I receive a monthly statement by email with the overview attached as an html file. I receive such a monthly overview for each of the Uxxx account numbers I have at IB.
I think that is something you have to configure? I'm not sure. I get a "daily trade report" email from IB with a HTML attachment. I also get a monthly email that notifies me that my "monthly statement is available" but it doesn't contain an attachment, and it doesn't include any hyperlinks to actual statements on the IB website. I guess I'll invest some time poking around
I seem to recall that it is indeed a configuration setting: you can select to get the monthly overview attached or not. Some people don't like it to get financial records sent to their email because certain email providers read and analyze the contents of your messages.