Talked to a cool broker, he said "I am short and just buy 100 now to balance it out". Their still the best broker and platform, now I know the program all is good.
90 minutes? Yeah, the support guys must be having one of these days as shown below and are taking longer breaks than usual. I believe 3rd Friday of the month is kinda' busy for options holders? Heh.
Their account openings are up over 400% YOY. They're having growing pains and had to hire people remotely.
At Fidelity and Schwab I am talking with a knowledgeable CSR within minutes. At IBKR it takes slightly longer plus I have the privilege of paying per share commissions!
Their model is to provide very low commissions. They do that by automating as much as they can, then hiring the bare minimum number of "customer service" reps, most of whom don't possess even the bare minimum of knowledge required to do their job. You get what you pay for, expecting them to answer the phone in a timely manner is like expecting a fillet mignon at McDonald's for $1.00.
Chat is easier for simple stuff, but my experience has been quite good getting IB’s people to assist me when it’s required. It helps to have a bigger account and/or more trading activity I’m sure. For example, this past week I reported a bug where a certain order type for an obscure product wasn’t going live properly (dark blue vs green). I’m sure this didn’t effect many people or for very long, but there was an opportunity to improve their platform from a limitation it had previously (and would be useful to me going forward), so I went ahead and told them about it.