opra, that is really a foolish thing to say. as you may have heard the ndx 100 is an extremely fast moving index and skilled investors can take advantage of that. this was a near expiration stretegy that has been very , very good to me. know it alls like you are the ones who should not be investing.
I'm not an IB customer, so I don't know. They are on TV advertising about options alot, and are known to be very automated. Also, Schwab is a Marketmaker. They could trade against your position. I can't imagine anyone actually having to use manual review in this day of computers, it's ridiculous, especially on a sale!. The only legitimate review could be a margin review on purchase. IMO, it sounds like a ploy to trade against you.
Schwab is a joke. Interactive Brokers is for serious retail traders. They do not conduct manual reviews of orders under normal circumstances. I never heard of them manually reviewing orders under any circumstances. I'm an IB customer, but I might not be completely informed, so I suggest you contact IB with your questions about whether they conduct manual reviews, just to be sure. Let me emphasize my opinion that the story you got from Schwab is ridiculous and outrageous.
I now mostly only trade options at Schwab on contracts that have wide spreads and/or are illiquid - things that involve lots of cancels. I used to do almost all my options trading there, but moved to IB because of the lower commissions and the opportunity to get price improvement. I traded hundreds of SPY and QQQ/QQQQ option contracts at Schwab and never ever got price improvement. I sure like the platform, though. In the time it takes to bring up an option series on other platforms, on SSPro you can bring up the series, choose a specific option, and place the order.
Fidelity will send an order for review if it's to open a position that goes over the "normal" margin requirements. I've had fills for better than my ask but not often. If you trade more than 250 contracts a month - and each way counts - so 125 two-way contracts traded, then you have access to OptionTrader Pro which gives you realtime options tables with directed trading. They've never delayed an order to close a position for me. The problem is they have limits on how much data they can store on a single stock (it's like 100 pages of single line data or something), and I don't think they're the cheapest around. Their ActiveTrader Pro also hangs up a lot so if you have a watchlist up with streaming data, it'll keep the primary stock updated, but every now and then you need to switch lists back and forth to get the whole list streaming. The OptionTrader Pro never seems to get hung up though. I would switch in a heartbeat from Schwab if they cost me 17k for something stupid like delaying an order to close. I'd leave the account open until the arb was done but the minute it was I'd be out of there because if it can happen once it'll definitely happen again.
Sorry if you feel offended. What I meant is, with that kind of wild fluctuation (as evidenced by -$17k), the speed of execution your broker provides is critical. Well, take the horrible experience with the broker as a lesson, that's all.
thanks for all your replys. actually there are some ways to make a case aganst them in arbitration. any ideas or thoughts are appreciated. who knows they may even offer to settle if they find its too much of a nuisance