Hi All, I am primarily on IB, which was completely down, and still is, for any trading purposes. I have a backup broker, which was also down. Did anyone have a broker which WAS able to trade during this outage, either on the ECNs, or better yet, at the Chicago futures exchanges, on Globex and ACE? Thanks!
IB's US servers are in CT. I don't have all details but we have backup generators. However, I believe they did not kick in properly and the systems had to be restarted. I don't have details about all the T3 and T1 lines going into the office either. In short, the system is supposed to fall over seamlessly in the event of a power failure (it has in the past) but something went wrong today. Naturally, we'll be taking a look at what happened and correct it.
Brown/Co and Datek/Ameritrade were both fine. Not a good sign at all for IB that they were down. They should be decentralized, with all the volume they handle. Very unprofessional. I just recently opened an account at IB, and was ready to move some serious dollars there. Isn't going to happen now.
always, always, always spread out your money. Use 2 3 or even 4 brokers if that's what it takes. Better to be safe than sorry.