Most ROBUST brokers right now

Discussion in 'Retail Brokers' started by pinetboltz, Mar 16, 2020.

  1. pinetboltz

    pinetboltz

    alright, for those of us who're looking to continue trading the increased vol, it's key to make sure we go with the most robust brokers

    eg: for all those who saved a few bucks on commissions with Robinhood, probably many arent too happy now given all those outages as reported in the news, etc

    even JPM's platform reportedly had some users being locked out last Friday, according to Bloomberg news

    so let's review and compare the performance of various platforms right now, given that the unprecedented volumes and volatility make it all the more important to differentiate and stratify the brokers by
    1) how robust are their platforms - consistency of being able to login anytime, actually place trades, working datafeeds, low slippage
    2) how customer friendly they are in not raising futures margins with no warning
    3) how financially secure and legit they are - eg not likely to blowout like some smaller ones did after Swiss franc unpeg

    more interested in recent performance of US futures brokers personally, but pls feel free to pitch in for international firms as well

    IB - outage reported by others on twitter for Mar 5-6, my experience is they have relatively higher margins to begin with, and have tendency to raise those margins even more during times of volatility, 95%+ of the time the feed and execution is ok but there remain those times when the feed on TWS breaks or orders cannot be placed and it takes 5-10+ mins to be back up again. on the whole i rate them:
    Platform performance - 4/5
    Customer friendly margin policy - 3/5
    Financials - seems stable

    Etrade - ?
    TradeStation - ?
    TDAmeritrade - ?
    Schwab - ?
     
  2. trdes

    trdes

    So far, I've had 0 issues with Tradestation for anything during these times.

    *Been able to log in 100% of the time
    *No errant trades, bad fills or charts freezing
    *Margins have been increased, but not as high as some others that have been reported on here.
    *I can not speak to the financials, but given they have not moved margins as high as some others I would think that means they aren't overly concerned, but I don't know that and it could be faulty logic or wrong.
     
    comagnum likes this.
  3. TradeZero_Mohamed

    TradeZero_Mohamed Sponsor

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  4. El_Cubano

    El_Cubano

    You guys have horrible customer support that can't or refuses to answer simple questions.

    I've emailed you directly and had no reply.
     
    bmoney and apdxyk like this.
  5. comagnum

    comagnum

    Been using IB for the Nikkie (Yen on SGX) & Tradestation for US indexes.

    Tradestation:

    Margins - up a bit, ES $9,185 NQ $11,880
    Platform - stable
    I depend on tick charts for my futures day trades. TS has tools that show the contract price changes - makes for fast risk/trade mgmt.

    upload_2020-3-16_8-23-55.png
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2020