I am willing to bet that most of your problems with IB and lack of resolutions are due to the abrasiveness of your character. next time you abuse someone on this board make sure you know the facts and can handle return fire. my experience with you shows that you sulk away.
Payment for Orders: IB receives payments for certain orders in varying amounts from U.S. options exchanges, specialists and/or market makers pursuant to the mandatory marketing fee programs that have been adopted by the exchanges and approved by the SEC. If multiple exchanges are quoting at the NBBO for an option order and IB has discretion as to where to send the order or a portion of it, IB generally will “break the tie” by sending the order to an exchange where it will receive the most payment for the order, or to an exchange designated by a firm from whom IB will receive the most payment at that market. This is a paragraph from the Dec. 2016 form 606.
The US is the only country in the world that uses fragmented markets and allow brokers to sell retail flow indiscriminately to high frequency trading firms. The US is the only country where brokers don't have to guarantee the best price Fills across exchanges. In Europe, they have to track data to prove that their clients got the best price or they are fined by the regulator. The US looks more like a third world country much like its infrastructure. My guess is that IB knows that this game will not be allowed to continue forever. Much like DB getting out of the triple leveraged ETF business which is also rigged against the retail investor. The business model detailed in the investor agreements we all signed, state that they sell our flow for $1.50/contract to market makers who think they can exploit us. I always hated this model and the difficulty in getting fair execution. The market makers are well capitalised and simply take the other side of retail Traders who use leverage and stop loss orders. Who wouldn't want to be the market maker in that scenario? Why would IB want to help them instead of their own customers? Longer term they would rather have their own customers trading with each other and keeping the profits within their own clients. They also avoid lawsuits in the future once people understand how that whole relationship works and retail investors were exploited. I'm going to put more order flow through IB going forward and much less with TD.
And what makes you think IB is any better? - they only very recently took down their highly deceptive default market data plan of BBO, replacing it with NBBO. BBO looks like plain old internalization. IB is sure a magnet broker for those that lean on cheap margin - the under funded and green traders. Their data feed rates are a rip off when you add in what a serious traders need - L2/book, plenty of quotes, etc than you just paid at least 4X over comparable brokers. Than there is their platform - some like it but many end up paying for a better platform - at the end of the day you have to add up all the extra costs it's not so impressive.