I believe Baron has something in the works with IB reps. Before that, this was just a forum section regarding the many issues users had about IB, which is pound-for-pound the most common broker used by ET users. I think. Just a guess. Baron seems a busy lad, give him time.
I'm a retail trader (not a day trader). Did somewhere between 1000 - 2000 trades with IB last year and similar amount this year. I'm happy with them.
What should they defend against? Anyone who trades with them for a while knows all Flaws and work arounds. Sometimes there are none, and people move accounts to other FCMs.
I've been reasonably happy with them but my system is pretty simple. However, my original question is not about whether they are any good.
Most start with big firms because they have an advertising budget and a marketing team bigger than many small corp. But, then traders get specific about data, margins, APIs, latency and do move to other FCMs.
Here's a song you can listen to while Baron gets the IB reps in here. An intermission, if you will...
OK, I'll take the bait Matt and "defend" ourselves. Most? really, I'd argue as accounts grow larger they want a firm that is financially strong, provides the ability to trade a larger and global asset class and care about specific items such as interest and do move to IBKR. Numbers speak for themselves. CFTC report as/of June (and this is just CFTC segment reporting) Interactive Brokers LLC Adjusted Net Capital - $5.4 Billion, Customer Segregated Assets - $3.9 Billion. I'm not here to get into a tit for tat, I'm not interested in shilling for accounts every time another brokers name comes up and I am honestly too busy to spend much time servicing a message board given my day to day responsibilities. I will agree traders do move from firm to firm at times but the numbers and growth don't lie. We (and any broker IMO) can't be all things to all people. IMO we put out a great product which will continue to evolve and improve and are second to none in many facets of the business. So back to the original question: While we can extend resources and reply to every post and defend against comments (some legit, many not), I don't think that is the most productive use of valuable time. We definitely respect all clients regardless of experience and go out of our way to put out product giving our clients the best opportunities to make money. A few others at IBKR are going to try to take some time to post but our aim is not to make this message board a service center. However, now that we're back advertising here (you can't post as a firm if you don't advertise), we'll probably be more active but for certain within reason.
That's not true as we do not look at it that way. While we do indeed have many sizeable accounts, there are many many thousands of accounts that are very active with far less capital. The $ size of an account does not necessarily determine its value or classification. To put another spin on it, there are numerous very large AUM accounts at Interactive Brokers which start off with as little as $10,000 to test the waters for a follow up transfer in or deposit of assets or lead to the opening of an institutional account for their firm or the fund for which they work.