Disagree with your assessment. Especially when it comes to reliability. We are probably talking apples and oranges with our needs and perhaps receive different levels of service because if you are paying inactivity fees you have a small account or not an active trader. Free data at other brokers comes at a price which is hidden in selling of order flow, high margins, low interest paid, high interest charged and so on and so on.
Yeah IB does not sell order flows. LOL Disclosures IB's Tiered commission models are not intended to be a direct pass-through of exchange and third-party fees and rebates. Costs passed on to clients in IB’s Tiered commission schedule may be greater than the costs paid by IB to the relevant exchange, regulator, clearinghouse or third party. For example, IB may receive volume discounts that are not passed on to clients. Likewise, rebates passed on to clients by IB may be less than the rebates IB receives from the relevant market. For example, IB may receive enhanced rebate payments for exceeding volume thresholds on particular markets, but typically will not pass these enhancements directly to clients This is straight from IB's own website: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=commission&p=options Yeah dismissing my assessment based on my account size. Highly doubtful that IB would provide you a better TWS just because you have larger account. We are all in the same boat. Didn't know why ppl have such severe Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to IB. LOL
Guess Barron isn't the only one that IB paid off. Not surprised, I forgot IB is one of the sponsors of ET.
exchange volume tiered rebates are not the same as sending and order to a 3rd party HFT. To each his own.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I have complained on here and to IB about occasionally wrong option quotes far away from ATM. That's a rare issue, but I still occasionally see it. The other issue I have seen is that sometimes in WebTrader (I don't use TWS) I sometimes get the wrong option chain displaying under the right tab. Maybe I have the AAL tab pulled up and I get the option chain for AMZN. They should have fixed that by now. Other than that, I have no complaints. As someone else mentioned, the inactivity fee is $10 per month. So if you do less than 10 trades per month, you're probably on the wrong forum. And even if I did less than 10 trades per month, I'd easily make up way more than that difference in the interest credit that I receive for the unused cash sitting in my account. They pay a lot more for that cash than other brokers. I haven't seen any exposure fees, but then again I'm not highly levered in risky shit. Never seen anything close to 30 second delays on the quotes. If you really need time and sales data, then you need IQ Feed. I don't know of any broker that delivers raw and un-bundled time and sales data.
Note the Barron's writeup on IB doesn't address any of the standard a§§clown complaints. https://www.barrons.com/articles/in...-top-spot-in-online-broker-ranking-1521854071 Interactive Brokers Takes Top Spot in Online Broker Ranking Interactive Brokers (4½ stars) returns to the top spot in our survey after a year of impressive growth. Though its range of services, low costs, and technology make it an excellent fit for extremely frequent traders—average annualized transactions per account hit 476 in this year’s volatile February—the firm has broadened its menu to appeal to less active clients, as well. The updated client portal that launched last fall is very responsive; it automatically adjusts the display, depending on which device you’re using. On some, it offers a simpler view of Interactive’s complex Traders Workstation platform, which will supplant its Web Trader this year. The software has become friendlier and offers a ton of information on a single page. You can customize the quote page to display graphs of various types, with a news ticker in the right-hand column. Within the Traders Workstation on desktop or iPhone, you’ll find Interactive Brokers’ natural-language assistant, IBot, which lets you ask questions in plain English and get a quick answer. For example, rather than digging for an options chain, you can ask IBot to display a particular strike and expiry date by saying, “Show options chain for SPY for the next three expirations.” You can type in queries or use voice recognition. It’s slick and reduces the learning curve. Interactive Brokers is known for allowing clients to trade around the world and around the clock. More prosaically, it now has a robo-advisory service, IB Asset Management, geared to people who don’t want to trade too often. Among the possibilities: 13 index-tracking portfolios that hold fractional shares of the companies in whatever benchmark they’re based on. Through IBot, investors can use institutional-level trading algorithms to accumulate or sell large positions. The client chooses the desired starting price, order type, and price increment over a set period. In addition, options traders can access a wide variety of spread tools; one lets them roll a spread to a future month with just a couple of clicks. On mobile platforms, you’ll find the Mobile Order Wheel. It lets you use your thumb to choose price, spread, dollar value of the trade, and other possibilities. About 50 more data points were added to the charting function on mobile devices, and IBot can help you learn about them. Fixed-income traders can use the secondary bond market scanner, which includes reports on municipal bonds. In a nice touch, the system offers links to local newspapers, where you can get the skinny on the projects tied to the bonds. A new service called Traders’ Academy provides lessons to both clients and noncustomers. Each course has two to eight lessons with quizzes along the way. Another offering is the PortfolioAnalyst, which can review assets held outside IB for complete analysis of your financial position. PortfolioAnalyst will be made available to non-IB clients later this year, and could be the answer to the death of Google Finance’s portfolio feature. One issue with IB is that you can only display streaming quotes on one platform at a time, so if you log in to your mobile app while the desktop platform is still running, one of them will be restricted to snapshot quotes rather than streaming. This seems like a quibble. But in light of the push toward uniform client experiences, it should be addressed.
Exposure fee that was charged to me was on an asset that was expiring and NOT trading at all and was IN the money. And yet they still applied their "worst case scenario" with 100% certainty and charged exposure fee. I guess IB is a Taleb fan when it comes to charging exposure fee to clients but then again if they REALLY are trying to be risk averse, WHY don't they raise the margin and forbid trading in those "highly risky" assets outright? The fee is not too high but it is what I consider bad practice and against the principle of "good faith"; it achieves nothing in terms of what it purports to achieve and all it does is increasing the trading cost of the trader unnecessarily. And with their frequent technical glitches that caused me missing favourable entry price and the spurts of snap shot of data, the potential profit that I lost FAR outweighed the interest payments that I receive from them. When I don't see trading conditions that warrant me to do a trade, I don't trade. I don't trade just for the sake of trading, that's just not what a prudent trader does. If you don't know that, maybe you are in the wrong forum. This forum is called "Elite Trader" not "Volume Trader". LOL But I shouldn't have to incur extra fees just because of my trading style. IB, it seems is only favoured by certain kind/style of traders but it should only be considered "top online broker" by ALL kinds of traders.