It is for sure good to be able to get the broker on the phone line when you have a problem; But, by the time I can get any stock order, I really wanted entered 2 minutes ago, entered through a phone call to a brokers trading desk, it is way too late and someone else is better off than I am. I bet it has been more than a year since I called IB and I have never called IB to place an order and I trade 5 days a week all day on IB. However, when it comes to IB, I do not think I could place an order with a phone call in less than an hour if at all. Catoosa
I opened an account at IB this month as many others have to "test the waters" I also wanted an account to trade small lot trades ( less then 500 shares) . I have been using Cypercorps Cyber X platform for 2 years .Great company and I like the software . Now when I was doing over 100 trades a month $ 9.95 a trade was not a problem , plus I was trading 1000 shares most of the time. I also have opened up an account at MB trading for those larger shares trades . I will not be using Cyber because I do not anticipate trading more then 50 trades a month going forward and I will not pay $ 14.99 a trade. Ib has been good , although the software is very cumbersome and I would not use it for anything but those small lot trades. I will fund MB this week , the interface looks great. You cant offer such deep discounts that Ib does without certain sacrifices , their customer support is lousy but then how often do you need it . For small trades Ib is the way to go , large trades I would not.
If you make any money at all trading you should have multiple platforms because at times they all have problems. You must have multiple quotes and multiple ways to execute. When IB works which seems to be most of the time IB is awesome for a retail guy. I use it as an emergency backup. But if you are going to trade with IB you should have a way to do orders on another system just in case. If you have limited funds you better know how to put on options by phone quickly. If I didn't own part of a pro/prop firm I would use IB more. I started to get into the pros and cons of real tick vs. redi vs other trade platforms. However, for many reasons, including an edge, I do not want to get into it here. Let me just say if you really care about making money you should do your homework because not all the information you read on this board is even remotely correct.
What follows is, of course, MHO. YMMV. The tone of the original post is kind of harsh, so I'm not making any effort to be non-confrontational. The author should not take it personally This is simply the way that NYSE is. It mostly doesn't stop your order from getting exposure to the crowd via the specialist if warranted. You can't really think that offering 1000 shares a penny inside a 0.05 spread when there are 50000 shares to buy and sell standing there at any given time is going to get you done any faster. In a liquid stock (like most Dow and SPX components), there is so much order flow in size that completely overshadows any orders that retail traders like us are likely to place, there is no point in continuously updating the quote. The specialist is almost constantly batching orders that cross and printing them. As someone pointed out, you can always send your order to an ECN, but my experience in most stocks (except maybe QQQ?) is that you won't ever get a fill that is in your favor. Sure, you'll get your bid hit, but it'll be just before the NYSE market comes down through you. If the specialist _were_ to update his quote constantly to reflect the electronic book, it wouldn't be any different. The auction market, and size, is what drives most of these stocks, regardless of what's displayed. With the advent of OpenBook, I'd expect that we're going to find out if it matters. You're still not going to know when someone walks into the GE crowd with 500K shares to buy, though. IB's NYSE quotes consistently outperform myTrack and ProTrader. They're (IB) the best I've seen. He must have been a newbie. If the order goes to SuperDot, it goes to SuperDot. It doesn't matter which firm it comes from. Other than Direct+, which will never show in the quote (it's for execution only), there is no other choice except to give your order to a floor broker, who will stand in the crowd and get you filled. You'll have to be trading some size, with an institutional broker. If you are disappointed with the speed or transparency of the electronic systems, try that just once You would be crazy to scalp trade NYSE stocks via the NYSE's execution systems, period, unless your strategy involves reading the specialist and fading the lemmings. There are people that do this successfully. It's nothing like trading NASDAQ stocks. IB sends your orders to SuperDot (or any of the ECNs if you like) just like any other broker. In my experience, their timing in doing that is as good as anyone's, and better than most. I trade a couple hundred thousand listed shares a month at IB. Most of my trades are on the ecns, and I'm often in them for seconds. I get acks and cancels within 2 seconds, and usually less than a second, from the ecns. Orders sent to NYSE are executed as well and as fast as (but mostly better than) any other broker I've been with in recent years (Waterhouse, MB Trading, Wit Capital, ETrade, Track Data).
musicman: I think the more you use IB's TWS, the better you will like it. While it may seem a bit complex at first, the flexibility is what makes it so great for trading larger orders all working at the same time on the same security and/or multiple securities at the same time. On large orders on the hot stocks of the day, place the orders with "Best execution" and let the software breakup the orders and find the best price and market for all of the partials of the orders. The more orders and the larger the orders, the greater the advantage of using IB's TWS. Catoosa
I trade with IB everyday, and I agree with alanm and catoosa. You have to consider what is best for your style though. For example, someone posted the shortcomings of IB TWS a couple of pages back, but I didn't care about any of they features he listed.