Interactive Brokers Takes Top Spot in Online Broker Ranking

tommcginnis · Mar 28, 2018

TWS is essentially a trading platform kit, which starts out looking like a spreadsheet, and can be warped and woven into some very different trading profiles, all depending on the time/effort that the individual traders/institutions wish to employ. Moreover, there are generally two or three different ways to do things -- whether constructing portfolios or the actions of trading -- such that two persons attempting to work on the other's platform may look at each other, befuddled, and ask, "What've you done here??"

If you don't like the way your TWS looks/acts, I'd look in the mirror.

HobbyTrading · Mar 28, 2018

truetype said:
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.
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Interesting to read their judgement criteria. The article has nine paragraphs. Only one of it relates to TWS. They seem to judge IB on a much wider scope. Whereas here on ET the discussion is almost entirely about TWS only. Not only in this thread, but in all threads about IB.

ET180 · Mar 29, 2018

JSOP said:
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.
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I haven't encountered any of those issues that you describe. On the average day, I probably put on 5 to 10 trades. I don't day trade and never have any issues finding high probability of profit trades or hedges to put on. So no, don't assume that I just trade for the sake of trading. In any case, it sounds like IB is not for you. What broker are you currently using?

JSOP · Mar 29, 2018

HobbyTrading said:
Interesting to read their judgement criteria. The article has nine paragraphs. Only one of it relates to TWS. They seem to judge IB on a much wider scope. Whereas here on ET the discussion is almost entirely about TWS only. Not only in this thread, but in all threads about IB.
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Well since we are all TRADERS so it's natural that we would be most interested in the TRADING platform of IB, TWS which is what we use daily to TRADE. What else is there about IB, besides its cost and customer service that we would be interested in? I don't know about the other nine criteria because I can't read the article, but I have a suspicion that they were all criteria that IB would easily score high in but bears little relevance to traders. That's probably why IB is always ranked "top" every single year.

JSOP · Mar 29, 2018

ET180 said:
In any case, it sounds like IB is not for you.
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Still doesn't negate the fact that IB shouldn't rank as the "top" online broker.

SoesWasBetter · Mar 29, 2018

While I have some issues with tws, there is NO 30 second delay, or even a 1 second delay.

Talking nonsense.

HobbyTrading · Mar 29, 2018

JSOP said:
Well since we are all TRADERS so it's natural that we would be most interested in the TRADING platform of IB, TWS which is what we use daily to TRADE. What else is there about IB, besides its cost and customer service that we would be interested in? I don't know about the other nine criteria because I can't read the article, but I have a suspicion that they were all criteria that IB would easily score high in but bears little relevance to traders. That's probably why IB is always ranked "top" every single year.
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Take a look at what @truetype posted and I quoted. That seems to be the original article at Barron's.

HobbyTrading · Mar 29, 2018

SoesWasBetter said:
While I have some issues with tws, there is NO 30 second delay, or even a 1 second delay.
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I also do not encounter such delays.

ET180 · Mar 29, 2018

To be fair, I am having issues with IB WebTrader this morning. It's very slow right now. Also, quotes under the AMZN option chain were wrong. Rarely have that issue though.