I did 100 at a time in XLE, tlt, GLD. They have a large order desk in Chicago for 500 options or 100 spx. Search for the number on www.ibkr.com
Keep trying to get a hold of them on the phone, cuss them out and see how it goes or just do what you already mentioned and know you should do and switch brokers.
So this begs the question then, if options trading is so challenging and deliberately cumbersome on IB, why does anyone trade with them?
Man I don't know, some people seem to enjoy complicating or losing at trading. People actually use ThinkorSwim platform (TD ameritrade / Schwab) to trade futures and they charge like $5.02 round trip for a MICRO futures contract. Even after you tell people this, they put on a smile and keep trading micro's with them and lose thousands and thousands of dollars in fee's for whatever reason they have (I truly don't know), than complain about not being profitable.
Good point. Although, I find TD Ameritrade a much better platform, much easier to use than IB, and none of the restrictive nonsense and regulatory messages. I live in Ireland so choice of brokers is limited here, but since IB is too much of a headache I reckon that is out of the question to continue trading on for me. Tastytrade looks good, and possibly Saxo Bank as well..
Ah, yeah I didn't deeply think about that. Yeah, being in some countries your choices are a lot more limited so that makes sense. I don't trade options, so I really shouldn't be commenting on what broker to use and you should default to other people here for that, but I have heard quite a few people using tastytrade.
That looks like a riskless arbitrage trade since there is no loss. That trade won't happen with TD during trading hours irl. It only seems to allow the trade to happen because you are in simulation mode. With IB, it's just trying to show you right away that it's a riskless arbitrage trade and it won't allow it to go through because you are trying to trade it after market hours and IB actually allows options trading during ATH. No broker would allow you to put through riskless arb trades. You might get lucky once in a very blue moon but in 99.9999999% of the cases, your order won't go through. Has nothing to do with IB.
I'm not sure what IB does for its estimation of bid/offer to calc the liquidation values. For larger trades, I think they widen the bid/offer a heck of a lot.