Morgan Stanley doesn't service the serious trader with $100k to $5mm, IB does. MS doesn't want your business, and you shouldn't want theirs. IB competes against TD-Waterhouse, Option Express and the like. Yes, they're acceptably-competent for the small LLC, which is more than can be said for any other broker in the retail space.
I agree completely. The openness and versatility of their platform AND their business model is a refreshing change to the standard heavyhanded US model. If firms like this can exist there is still hope for the captalist model. I sincerely hope they will not sell their soul and go the 'coporate world' way. Ursa..
I used TD Waterhouse a few years ago. Mutual fund trading was fine but without fail I got poor to borderline criminal fills on my trades. I did much better with stock trades at Scottrade but they lost two separate mutual fund orders I placed. After the first one I thought maybe I had't submitted it or something -- but after the second I was sure I placed it and it disappeared overnight. I guess every broker has their issues....
I'm not too pleased with IB lately, but their API is bad? Not in my mind. I haven't found a better one. It's by far the easiest for me to bring up a new automated trading system on. Not trying to call you out, but I'd love to hear of some alternatives that you think are better. I'm sure it all depends on what you're trying to do, but for me, IB's API is very good. It's by far the best documented and supported I've come across.
Oh, I love that quote above. Get this: I'm with a great brokerage, best people, always listening, very responsive in that regard, platform is solid, but listen to this: Daily bar charts are "broken" in the sense that Volume is not reported for every day. I mentioned it 8 weeks ago. No action. They just rolled-out a new service release. STILL wasn't fixed ! Response: low priority, other issues more urgent. I mean JEEZ, I could get the same chart FREE from Yahoo or some other web-based charting service. This is basic "stuff". Some day, someone will be able to do it all: 1) low commish 2) great responsiveness 3) attention-to-detail 4) fast technical fixes 5) solid platform - never goes down. Who will it be ?
Really ? I'm ready to hire you Dude ! See below from API forums: The confusion over the reqIDs method alone is "telling" . These posts are within the last 4 months.
I never said they don't have problems, but in my experience the others are far worse. You didn't suggest anyone better..... Take Sterling for example. You can't even do something so basic as to modify an ECN order through their API. Documentation is just a few pages and doesn't even list the coniditions under which a specific event will fire. Programming examples are years old and written in VB6. And support? It's the secretary! His job is to make sure that you never get to talk to someone who programmed the API. You can't even get an email address. Compared to that IB looks platinum level in my book. Edit: Oh yeah, and I get to pay $200/month for this! My experience with broker API's is everybody loves to write them, nobody wants to support or document them. IB has a least made the effort.
I gave up the fight with autotrading on IB about a year ago. Now i do EOD/EOW trading doing 20 - 40 trades a year. If something screws up i dont care and try to log in tomorrow or next week. Funnily i make more money this way and have loooots of free time. In fact i could easily work and generate a second income. But i prever going fishing. Havent had a trade for about six weeks now . Also dont really know what this thread is about
I do about 5-10 trades a month, don't need an API capable of handling automated trading, but I do keep a large margin balance relative to my actual cash a lot of the time, so margin rates are important to me. My balance is less than 100k. I looked on IB's site and couldn't figure out what my margin interest would be, although it looks like it would be less than what I'm paying now. Can someone tell me?