I would also add, I would worry that someday, anyone with enough details on my account could call in to a little broker, and have the funds wired out. Or hack in and cause chaos with the account. Or these $300 emini day margins could cause one to go belly up. At least with IB, they have the security tokens, and departments dedicated to security and accounting, and are very conservative about margin when things get chaotic.
Yes the credit risk is low but so isn't Fidelity's. They offer pretty much every exchange in the world but how many "retail" investors need all this? They do offer portfolio margingin but again, how many retail investors need this? My point being as it stands now the client base they WILL HAVE to attract isn't the quasi professional they cater to now. The demographic they need is more of the Fidelty/ Schwab investor that calls into customer service every single day and IB just is not equipped to handle that level of service. The have an outstanding offering for semi professionals BUT they will never attract a billion dollar hedge fund nor will they get the vanilla retail customer either. I could be wrong but I've worked in many areas of the brokerage/ trading industry and know the space well but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
Sorry I misunderstood your post, I agree they can't go after the normal retail guy, and don't have enough support for a big fund. I meant for a small pro operation, they are among the best of the bunch. That is more a comment on the sad state of the market than IBKR being outstanding, but they do have some key competitive advantages for those of us not swinging the $20 mill+ needed for prime brokerage, or those who do swing that but don't want to place their money at institutions leveraged 20:1 or more. Let's face it, IBKR is a better credit risk than Goldman Sachs.
good news. they are likely to exempt MM's fron this new anti-terror short rule. Maybe they should implement position limits.