Hi, I considered to open an account at IB for trading the e-minis, because of their very low commissions. Unfortunately in the last couple of weeks I often read from problems at IB with their tradingplatform TWS, due to connection problems between IB and the Globex system. Other traders reported from things like account discrepencies and losses after being unable to getting a competent help from the IB help desk and clear up the problems . Does IB sent any advance warnings before they cut the connection? Would you recommend trading the e-minis with IB ? All your statements are very appreciated ! Greetings from Germany ! SAICO
No system can give you advance warning. I think there are better choices, however they are still better than most. It really depends on the size and frequency of your trades.
Actually, they sometimes do warn a few minutes before the connection is going to go down, but obviously only if they have to take it down on purpose. Think of it this way: How much would it cost you to have another broker to offset your positions in case IB goes down? If it is in the vicinity of what you save on commissions, you should definitely go with IB. Let's say a different broker (your backup broker) requires that you keep $10000 in your account and pays no interest on that, then your cost is somewhere in the lower 2-digit dollar-amounts per month. If you trade 100 round trips per month and IB saves you say $200 in commissions on that compared to a more reliable broker, I believe you have your answer. Also, two independent brokers are more reliable together than only one very reliable broker. Also, it's not like IB/Globex goes down more than once every few weeks for a few minutes to an hour.
I don't think the issue is maintenance outages, the problem used to be the "purple screen of death". That happened a lot more frequently than every couple weeks. In addition you have the Globex outages, when everyone is down.
I have had the purple screen on my futures account probably between 3 and 10 times in the last half year, and don't remember more than one instance where it lasted longer than half a minute. Of course, that experience is very subjective since it depends on your internet connection and/or the route from your machine to IB. The daily server shutdown around midnight Eastern is of course excluded from my statement.
We don't trade there anymore however, we used to have 5 accounts up @ the same time and sometimes they would all go out at once, sometimes different ones independent of each other. The frequency was more like everyday. The longest outage was hours, not minutes. I have a lot of friends still using TWS and all they do is complain about that and lack of trade/technical support. The only reason they stay is the commissions.