Not angry - well certainly not after the therapeutic exercise of slapping these idiots with the proverbial wet fish. I just enjoy poking the idiots who start some of these incorrectly titled threads. Not an employee because my advice to anyone who is unhappy with IB is "take some responsibility for your trading and stop whinging about it; find another broker you can be happy with, even, lol, Merrill Lynch." If you've got all those problems with IB then leave. But creating stupid thread titles and whinging; give us all a break.
First of all, my experience has been that IB's platform has been very highly reliable, with very rare exceptions, and other IB customers routinely acknowledge this fact on EliteTrader. Second, IB, unlike so many other brokers, doesn't use shills. IB doesn't need shills. This is because IB has employees who directly communicate with the public on EliteTrader, instead of masquerading as happy customers. IB's reputation also benefits from genuine customers, like myself, who are willing to share their positive and negative experiences. Third, I believe that the starter of this thread had a hidden agenda. If his agenda were truly as stated, to find info on brokers other than IB, then he would have entitled the thread in such a way as to focus attention on his inquiry. The thread title, and the first sentence of its first post, are instead focused on damaging IB's reputation, in a way which does nothing to promote the pretended agenda of finding information about other brokers. I submit that the sole purpose of this thread was to damage IB's reputation, and that the request for information about alternatives was nothing more than a cover story. If this person had been knowledgeable enough to evaluate IB's quality and to render any sort of opinion about it, then he wouldn't have needed to start this thread to request info about IB's competitors, since he would have already known what was available. The person who started this thread made only one other EliteTrader post, prior to starting this thread, and that post was completely devoid of any substantial content which might suggest that this person was actually a trader. I think this person's first post was actually made for the purpose of establishing his cover as a pretended IB customer, so that he could then damage the company's reputation with bogus criticism. I think it was also entirely unfair for him to use this thread, and it's title, in order to criticize IB, while simultaneously requesting that nobody attempt to respond with an opposing viewpoint. Experienced EliteTrader members have seen hundreds of threads like this one, coming from obvious shills who have no substantial prior history of contributing to ET, and who start their thread by knocking a particular company, usually IB, and then camouflage their motives and loyalties by asking for info about competitors. My conclusion is that this person was never a customer of IB, and that this person is actually shilling for an IB competitor. If he disputes this accusation, then I would challenge him to provide proof that he is an IB customer. If he does provide proof, then I would apologize for jumping to the wrong conclusion. It would not be the first time I was wrong.
For this people who don't know how to ping correctly. Start -> Run Type cmd into the text field and hit Ok The command prompt window will open Cut and Paste ping gw1.ibllc.com into the window and hit enter You should get something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\YourName>ping gw1.ibllc.com Pinging gw1.ibllc.com [208.245.107.3] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 208.245.107.3: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=106 Reply from 208.245.107.3: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=106 Reply from 208.245.107.3: bytes=32 time=88ms TTL=106 Reply from 208.245.107.3: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=106 Ping statistics for 208.245.107.3: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 88ms, Maximum = 89ms, Average = 88ms
Merrill has direct access where we can excute trades ourself? I have to admit tho., the only place for a unviersal account which you can trade everything is probably firms like merrill, bank of america. I dont think they want to talk to you if you dont have at least 20 million in asset.
Oh yeah, but reality is all connections, (no matter where you are )go down...it is the contingency plan, i.e. what happens next will determine how good is your daytrading business plan is. [Gosh what a fucking joke of a prior sentence.] We had problems in Manhattan connecting to Spear Leeds Servers. With IB you are shit out of luck...but that is by no means their fault....
Fully agreed! Judging from the inaptitude of the originator of this thread, eg, blaming a supposedly failed pinging exercise squarely on IB's platform or servers he's almost certainly a two-bit shill for an IB competitor.
LOL ... it would seem that someone so clearly not prepared is probably not a shill ... simply NOT competent With time and considerable effort he may move beyond that. I have known people who happily used electronic services without understanding their computers, the internet, or what the broker had to provide to make it work. But, without exception, they knew their limitations and hired people who did understand to make those things work for them. Professional traders, not gamblers, manage and accept their risks at every level.
I disagree with your assumption that shills are unlikely to be incompetent. I think he is a laughably incompetent shill. Many, if not most of the people shilling on EliteTrader, are just as incompetent as the author of this thread, and seem to know nothing about trading. I think shills are very likely to be incompetent. If they were competent to do something else, then they would probably not be shilling.
Hey Kiwi Trader, Are you trading from Godzone? Which ISP are you with? I guess on Bitstream you get the same performance regardless of the provider? Do you have anything for backup in case telecom's exchange goes tits up?
No. I'm in Aus. Telstra and backup is dial into Equant SP but its about a year since I last used it in anger. Finally a non-Telstra cellphone to call IB and cancel any positions if I lose the internet altogether. In Aus (and I suspect NZ) there are cheap services where the isp concentrates too much traffic onto their backbone (and use cheap routers etc) so you can choose much cheaper options. But you get what you pay for. Also I have an IB US and IB HK account to provide two servers but my real backup strategy given the rarity of failure is to close all positions and take a break for the day. Much more rewarding to go fishing or surfing in that case.