IB is a public company, worth 20B. there are lots of traders like me who want to switch, but there is no second broker which can directly compete with IB on the following features at the same time: 1) API support 1) low commision 2) low margin rate 3) broad market to trade there are so many brokers competing for occasional app/web traders, but no other brokers want to compete directly with IB, why?
I only trade futures, so i was able to move away from IB recently. Now trade with AMP and Rithmic API platform. They are much better for Futures day trading than IB. And you don't need to keep much cash with them as day trading margin rates are so low. If you trade stocks there must be alternatives to IB for stock trading that can match or beat IB in those first 3 categories you listed So maybe we need accounts across two or three brokers, that specialise in the instruments we need, just cant do everything in one Universal account like IB offers. But that wasn't an issue for me as i only want to day trade futures and was able to find an alternative for doing that.
I mainly trade stocks. I can not find other equity brokers which can compete with IB. that is why I have no other choice but still stay with IB till so far.
Really there are no other Stock brokers with an API, low margin and low commissions out there? Thats really not asking for much in 2020.
What is wrong with Ib? My main and only issue is f...n restarts even of gateway. Otherwise quite good.
Some new brokers are trying, like Alpaca, but they are years away from being able to seriously compete with IB, if ever. This may involve large investment, resources, expertise/people and infrastructure. Others don't want to deal with APIs when they can make similar money without APIs, saving time & resources. Some brokers offer institutional APIs and don't want to deal with small traders. While even if you find another broker, you may run into same problems as you have with IB (whatever those problems are) and then look for yet another broker.
It’s not that they don’t want to, they can’t. It seems IB accumulated lots of useful features over the years which would be costly to implement because they are needed by some but not the majority of retail and semi-pro traders (even many pros). People who need serious automated trading, for example, most likely are part of a firm that can either implement things in-house or pay good money to a third party. So you are left with people who produce more headaches than revenues because they need lots of hand holding, especially when you give them choices. “Dumb customer is our best customer” is much more profitable model.
Gravity and money. Gravity in that people seem to flock to larger brokers (for many reasons) which means they get larger which mean more people flock towards them and so on. Of course you still need to offer a great product which they do. Money. Think about how much money has been invested in the company over the years. That's hard to beat. MOney also breeds security. IB is hard to beat basically. Someone will try but it will probably take 10 years+.
Search around on Google. There used to be a free software program (not offered by IB) that enabled the software so it didn't have to log-off every 12 or 24 hours. I don't know if it's still available though.