But you don't offer : - Universal accts (trading multiple products from 1 SIPC acct) - Multicurrency accts (I think a lot of European traders would like to open an acct in EURO's to avoid EUR / USD risk) - Advanced order types like LOO (At least not with the demo) - Hotkeys for COMBINATION orders (limit + attached stop limit and limit order) Do you plan on offering this ?
This is a bad idea for more than one reason: 1) the spreads on SSF's are terrible. You are automatically paying the spread (often .10 or more on SSF's even on liquid stocks) and are down say, $100 on 1000 shares. With a bullet, your only cost is the per share cost, so in this case it would be about $10. 2) This is horribly margin inneficient. In order to keep this position on for the day, you would have to have margin on both the SSF and the equity. Even with a $50K account and say a $50 stock, this would be close to all you could trade if you wanted to trade 1000 shares. With a bullet, you need to put up like 1/10 or 1/20 (I forget exactly) the required margin to actually hold both positions [DIM put option and long stock.] 3) because of 1 and 2 above, you would pretty much have to "pick" your stock for the whole day and be stuck with it. With real bullets, you could just grab one as you need it (important if you trade news) and whack away. 4) [maybe] it is slower to execute to positions as a leg than a bullet as a spread. When I used the PointDirex system [now Xoom], I had a bullet in less than 1 second. There is no question that IB needs to supply margin efficient, fast electronic bullets to stay ahead of the competition. nitro
I'm hoping def will reply to this thread with some sort of time-frame in which IB hopes to implement bullets..
But wouldn't that fly in the face of the rules that are in place to regulate short selling, since IB is essentially a retail firm? Elvis
we've done some research on them and there might be some regulatory hurdles/issues. i think bullets in some kind of shape and/or form are in the works but I dont' have any time frame or further details to provide.
SSF is bs. You can not get the advantages of getting bullets in less than a second or the press of one key. Bullets are the way to go. I think IB must be the last pro firm out there that doesn't offer them.
Def, I do not see how this can be. PointDirex (now Xoom) has been offering them for a long time. They are also a retail firm. nitro
For starters I don't think they are not a member of the NYSE and more importantly we make our legal and regulatory decisions based upon our own research. If another major firm with a large client base was offering bullets to retail investors, perhaps that would be enough of a precedent. I'm not involved on the legal aspects of this and thus am slightly in the dark. The most I can say is that perhaps we will offer something in the near future.