If the platform is down due to high volume, I would expect the phone lines to be jammed as well. Lots of panicky traders will be calling the brokers by phone to sell down their position. I seriously doubt there will be enough human operators to answer the phone. The safest is to have a reliable broker that does not break down during high volume panic days. Interactive Brokers seems to be good so far. I hope IB will continue their performance given that their platform is a favourite among the active traders.
We were fine this week but technical problems can happen at any broker. If you have the assets and trade full time, a second broker is your best bet.
Had issues with AxiTrader using MT4. Trading the S&P500 CFD, sometimes the market would freeze for minutes and I was unable to get a quote or even close my positions. Obviously I am now going to close my account with them and find another broker. Anyone have any good recommendations for CFD brokers for a European citizen. I only trade the S&P500.
IB had a major outage a few weeks ago, was down for like 3-4 hours. It was an option exp Friday if I recall.
If the objective is to buy, having a second broker helps. However, if the main concern is in not being able to sell out the equities held in custody, having a second broker is not helpful. The equities are held in custody. Customers can only sell out using the same broker through which equities were bought.
Data outages are bad, but not nearly as bad as not being able to access the broker site or software at all. It helps to have market data to be able to trade, but you can use a free site or another broker to get market data in a pinch (or if you're too cheap to pay IB for it) and still place your sell orders or hedge if needed to manage your risk. IB hasnt gone down in my recent memory, the way you couldn't log in to TDA at all for an hour on Tuesday.
You can always buy an opposite position at the other broker to freeze your P&L. Not ideal but better than a sharp stick in the eye that you'd get otherwise.
IB has had two Friday's in the past month with outage related problems. One of those Friday's only affected ES FOP's. I did notice that there were at least a handful of traditional retail brokerages down Monday/Tuesday, similar to what happened on Aug 24, 2015.