No problems here with MB. I dont trade on Sunday evenings. Mymini you must be a superb trader too make profits ona Sunday night. I had the exact opposite experience with IB few years ago, like you said, good luck with that broker. If you think there is a perfect broker, you must be dreaming. Good luck trading.
mymini....... I am just getting online from being out of town but I have checked and I see we have been disconnected from the cbot on one particular price server. All other price servers are working fine. This has been fixed immediately. Did you call tech support to report this? Regards, Steve
say what you want steve but mb trading is fine for a retail trader who trades now and then but a hard core trader would be a fool to trade there.i have accounts with mb ,ib and several other professional trading outfits and there's no comparison. mb won't even disclose who they route option orders to as they're selling order flow. at least 50 times over the past 6 months i've placed option orders with mb in between the bid and ask on options with 20 or 30 cent spreads. rarely have i ever gotten a fill so i cancel and re enter with ib and i get a fill about 50% of the time. when i confronted mb and asked were these orders are being routed they refused to tell me and said it was proprietary info. i thought that was illegal and a abroker must disclose that. mb is getting order flow payment and ib does not on options. also your quotes lag many other vendors. as i said for a retail guy who trades a little they're fine but for a active trader no way
no same thing with stocks. they're slower than ib there too. plus i just find there order entry system awkward. if you're going to be a hard core trader of stocks and trade even 10k sahres a day investigate a good elvel 2 system like genesis who have easy hot key order entry's using your key board. for instance if you want 1000 aaple in increments of 500 shares you can hit the key twice and it hits the ask 2 times in less than a second. even ib's sytem for stocks is cumbersome. if you're not a heavy trader i'd still use ib as there stock commissions are much lower than mb at .005 per share all in no sec fee. for instance most people do 300 shares or so at a time so you pay $1.50 with ib with no sec fee and $3 at mb with an sec fee. so mb is over 100% more. mb's a good company but ib's a great company with much lower stock commissions for the avg trader who trades less than 500 shares at a time
I just opened the account last week and started trading on friday, i traded with Scottrade for a year and thought why pay 7 bucks when i can pay 0.01 a share. So I switched. Also getting better interest rates on my money at 4.23%. Im not an active trader. This year so far im up to about 135 trades. Which have cost me a fortune at Scottrade. Could have save hundreds of dollars if I made the switch earlier this year. Ill stick with MB for now, if start trading even more I may switch to IB sometime in 2007. Thanks for the info about the servers. As long as there up during market hours i dont mind.
MBT - steve: I feel MB trading should put together its own software package comprising all the analytical tools a trader needs. This is one area where this brokerage falls short of expectations. It is cumbersome to say the least when you have to integrate the navigator with other software vendors like e-signal. IMHO when they achieve this milestone they will put a lot of distance between themselves and the rest of the field. PS: i know software fees maybe an issue but this could be resolved by charging a fees which can be waived if a trader trades x number of shares or trades per month which is standard procedure employed by other brokerages.
Steve, sorry to intrude on your thread but your comments in regards to IB option routing are misleading. Yes, IB does have an affiliate, Timber Hill, that might be on the other side of a trade but Timber has no prior knowledge of client orders. I'm sure you know this. Your comments seem to imply that clients aren't receiving the best fills as a result and that is false. All trades execute on an exchange at or better than the NBBO. IB's first and foremost aim is to obtain the best fills and prices for our clients. Our stats clearly back this up. Feel free to speak to Penson on this as I'm sure they've seen them. Also, I'm not sure what you're getting at when implying there is a problem if you get filled between the bid/ask spread. If an order is sent between the bid/ask IB's proprietary SMART routing will immediately route it to an exchange where it will be then immediately be posted and thus improve the NBBO. Finally, having an investment in an exchange also doesn't have any impact. The decision on where to route is based upon obtaining the best fill. The BOX has been a boon to options trading and routing to that exchange has saved clients a huge amount of dollars in price improvement. In any event, IB executes millions of option contracts per day and < 5% of non-directed orders were routed to BOX last quarter. I should also note that IB is also a member of all options exchanges and has investments in a number of exchanges.
I will continue to chronicle, MB Trading platform and connectivity issues here. Dow Mini futures contract was down Sunday Aug 6th ES,NQ were OK.