I think he, like a lot of us, invested a lot into writing code for IB's API that would be costly in terms of time to refactor to another broker. I bit the bullet and left, but I'll be damned if I let IB trap another guy like me in the same way. If I'd read up on them here before I chose them I probably never would have. It's a public service to let people know how they run their business, hopefully we can spare a few new traders some pain down the road. The sad part is that for the most part they could make some minor changes and make their company so much better. They just don't give a damn about the customer and essentially tell you to go f*(K yourself when you point out areas they could improve. And bizarrely their customers on ET often respond the same way, must be some version of the Stockholm Syndrome.
As Sig pointed out, I'm very attached to their API by now. This is why I would much rather they listen to customers and implement some improvements. I'm not suggesting anything too dramatic but in the last years commissions have slightly increased, margin requirements for most equities have gone up and IB internal technical problems are more common. We could do with some improvements in the service quality or lower pricing.
So your short answer is no, no single broker can match the five basic criteria I mentioned. (If you don't what an algo is, you are definitely correct that we do not share the same needs).
True. Yet for some reason people seem baffled that IB implements an auto-liquidation program to prevent the very risk you describe.
IMO, IB automates their risk to keep cost down. They can't staff themselves to do it manually. That manual process can protect the client in cases of errors in their system.
Right. They are offering a great margin rate in exchange for the client accepting automated risk control. That's an excellent trade-off for me and many other traders. For others, it may not be worth it.
BTW, in addition to our relationship with Wedbush securities, we are also introducing brokers to IB and I have a number of LVX accounts there.
I grasp what an algorithm is. I used IBs API pretty extensively, it actually locked me in and is the only reason I stayed as long as I did because I didn't want to refactor my code for a different API. Most of us who write our own code would call what IB offers an API, or application program interface. The algorithm, or algo, is what we write ourselves to implement our trading logic. I wasn't sure if you were mistakenly calling the API an algorithm, or if there is some other feature they added since I left that allows you to use algorithms they wrote to execute their trading logic for you. If it's the latter I can think of few things scarier than trusting IB staff to come up with trading logic as logic itself seems to generally be a foreign concept to them!