no. no antivirus. you have to completely trust all pieces of software you are installing. what exactly do you need to trade with Ib? operating system(original,not downloaded from P2P), java, TWS(preferably stand alone) and browser.clean install,cascaded network connection. and leave it alone. no flash,no browsing. maybe install firefox. IE is a piece of s** anyway. after that i would also disable few things in windows. such as firewall,automatic update,security center. seriously. to keep it clean and simple as possible. off course secure login in IB must be enabled with token or card.
why would you need antivirus on your trading Pc? how the virus can get there,if you only using it for trading? even if there is a virus or whatever-how they can get your money? they need a f** card in their hands to gather the access to account. even if they get there-how the hell they are going to steal the money? the only thing they can do is trade under your name. but who in his right mind would do that and go this far in IB,when there is a plenty less sophisticated(in terms of security) brokerages?
You have given me a lot of food for thought. Very original ideas (at least to me). I am trading with IB and I use Multicharts for my research. I manually execute. So, the kind of world you have described and also as per my configuration, if I do buy another PC and designate it as a trading PC and have just these few things (TWS, Java, Multicharts) on it, I really might not need antivirus. I guess having a separate router is important though in this case.
Looks like I said this prematurely. I still donot have access to account management. Only can login TWS that doesnot have live market data and can only close out existing positions.