1. Patience, especially when trying to contact IB CS. 2. Stop complaining (customer side) & Accept complaint but remain the same (company's side). Because, after so many years, IB has not tried to solve problems. Complaining won't let them suddenly have the motivation to enhance the system, so complaining is useless. 3. Advertising is more important than continuously enhancing service. Because you can have more revenue by advertising "when you are passionate about investing, you cannot compromise....." to attract more new customers. Those people who always complain about IB service and close IB account is just a small part, so no need to upgrade the system. no need to enhance IB CS service. No need to solve complicated bugs. If old customers leave, the new customers will fill the gap.
IBs nightly hour reset is a real pain! They should at least give a warning/countdown prior to the resets. The blurb on their web site about the resets is very inadequate - no other futures brokers do such a thing - I am sure many customer's are upset about this.
1) The importance of diversifying your trading capital and not put it all with one broker like IB. 2) Advertised trading cost from a broker is not a true reflection of the actual cost that you would and could incur from a "unique" broker like IB 3) The importance of self-study when expertise and familiarity with the broker's products/services is non-existent by the broker's customer service.
1) rude tone of messages from IB to their customers. Immediate threats to disable trading if the customer "does not do this or that" by a certain deadline. 2) IB never confirms to their customers that a certain request from them has been closed to their satisfaction. They will keep the customer "on the hook" indefinitely. The given threat of disabling trading (see item #1) lingers on forever.
Know your tools, their limitation and work within those parameters. Once you get your primary system running, get your secondary working. Know how switch over. Practice. Anything less that preparation when real money is on the line, is your responsibility. This is not retail purchasing, so don't expect any person to really be of serious help beyond simple logistics. Also IB TWS is a collection of bolted on tools. There is not much integration let alone a grand strategy. Look at the 3rd part tools for solutions to common needs.