The trading firm I'm at didn't have a hiccup. I was looking in to trading Futures with IB, but a friend told me that the system goes down frequently and getting them on the phone.....good luck. Any insight?
IB spends a lot of $$$ on systems and programmers. So they offer a good product and a wide array of things to trade. The downside is that they want self reliant traders. I have heard their customer service reps are the lowest in the industry. This means that they are likely overworked and underpaid. A bad combo for trying to get phone help. Everything is computerized for low cost broker expenses. They have historically spent a lot of $$ on "more important" things, than helping people with trade issues. It is a trade off. You can always tell how a firm is doing by how they treat you when you threaten to leave )close your account). If a firm is growing then the number of opened new acounts to closed accouts is large and they do not care about the outflow. And vice-versa. IB does not care an ounce if you close your accout so they must be doing well.
Def can chime in on this one... Yesterday I had put in a sell stop limit order for the Emini at 1046.25 at about 9:50 am EST. About 5 mins after the market heads south and takes out 1046.25 but nothing happens my order just sits there. No message from IB that Globex is down or anything. After a minute or so I cancelled the order. Called IB and bitched as the market tanked. IB said "duh, i dunno" and said that if I hadn't cancelled my order they might be able to do something for me but because I cancelled it the order was cancelled. (Huh, thought I was being prudent) I was able to recompose myself and profit from yesterdays action. Almosted cancelled my account....