def perhaps i was a bit harsh on IB in retrospect. I understand your philosophy, highly automated strict risk control allows you to offer extremely competetive commisions. Plus you make markets from New York to Pluto. I also hear you are doing some good things for volatility traders like myself with scanning and searching tools in various vol environments. Sorry to flame so much, but I really get emotional sometimes when companies seemingly treat customers poorly, and unfortunately it seems IB gets the lion's share of broker complaints on ET. That could just be a product of having many more clients than any other broker, I don't want to speculate. Anyway it's late. good trading all.
appreciate your post, i admit i am quite sensitive to such comments. we do get our share of complaints on this forum but that'salso a function of a large client base, a larger product set, strict sets of rules and the fact that a number of senior IB staff are posting on this site. by all means we're not perfect but we certainly do our best to continually improve our product.
I have seen that problem many times. It happens AH till midnight. You see suddenly an option that is priced at 2 jumps to 100 and your account goes up or down by thousands and your SMA and and cash value become negative. I have learned how to deal with it. The solution is: Just set back and relax and know that those numbers are wrong and at the same time you know that you will not pay interest or get liquidated based on the wrong numbers. I always look at my daily account report which is always correct. If market is open , the numbers are correct, if market is closed, the numbers sometimes are wrong that I don't care but as you said I don't know why it is happening and I also like not see such quote fluctuations.
This is all very nice, but did you try to trade when your account is negative? There are many things that trade overnight and you cannot do squat. This is a serious bug and I wish IB took care of it when I complained. I'm sure it will be fixed shortly. BTW, I have a lot of respect for IB. They are head and shoulders over the rest (and I tried quite a few).
I can accept various problems with IB, like closing out Treasury positions ahead of the roll by accident. Well not really but thats another story. The real problem is with custimer service which I have found non-existent. You have better odds of getting a reply here than e-mailing them.
it does impact the value and net liquidation...for example... if the gaps between bid/ask are large premarket it only means you may not be able to trade that stock unless you get lucky with being filled inside that gap...which is just par for our business... the problem occurs once the market opens at 930am and you have stocks that maintain large bid/ask spreads.... I have notice this occurs mostly with nyse stocks.. some of these stocks maintain a large bid/ask on both stock and options for minutes...935-945am...during which time your ability to trade is comprimised and in some cases could case IB to liquidate positions..as a result I would like to say for the record that IB's customer support and service has improved a hundred fole...from tws tech issues to assistance with banking and their staff being much more knowledgeable with their software. Issues and glitches are still present but I personally have seen a great improvement and am thankful. One improvement I personally would like to see is the ability to place a working order... w
The problem with index quotes I was talking about affects only the CBOE indices. It does not affect any holdings I may have and does not change my account balance. Furthermore, the problem is not so severe that I need to change brokers. I don't trade at night. And if I did, I would have my system remember the closing value. But you can't trade a system at night that uses index quotes, so it can never be a problem. Nevertheless, it is such a simple problem to fix that I wish IB would do something about.
I only trade stocks and options. I just see wrong data (sometimes) when the market is closed and as I said , I don't care and I know that it is only a mistake. First time it scared me .I guess if the market is open the data should be correct as it has always been.
It is not true that "...it can never be a problem." You could trade the S&P index overnight using e-mini (ES) via GLOBEX. If you hold SPX options short overnight and something happens overnight that makes you want to hedge your position, you just can't due to this bug.