Agree, I'd much rather have IB focus on low commissions and trade execution rather than charting. There are 3rd party charting platforms and market data available if others are not satisfied with IB's included offering. It is the responsibility of the trader to find the best broker for his/her needs. It's not IB's responsibility to provide whatever feature or pricing structure that someone desires. Personally, I don't borrow on margin so I don't care what IB charges for their margin rates. I do appreciate that I get paid at least some amount (currently around 1.6%) on my idle cash. My bank doesn't do that. I also appreciate that they don't charge for exercise and assignment beyond the typical cost of executing a stock / ETF trade. I can't find another broker that does that. I also can't find another broker that offers a very extensive API for free to all it's users. I'd much rather have that because then I can do whatever I want with the data vs. being limited to how my broker thinks I should view price. If you want something like TradingView, it's available for free and I use it daily. That said, things I think IB could fix and probably would not cost them much time or resources: -Better historical data. Even on SPY, I see one or two instances where it traded higher than thousands of $ in 2007. Everyone sees that (if looking at daily bars). Why not fix the obvious errors. (Although I made a simple Java-based adjuster that does this. Happy to share the code if others are interested, only useful for offline post-processing, not for viewing data in TWS.) -TWS is really slow to load. After loading, it's fine. I have a quad core Intel i5-8350U laptop with 32 GB of memory and it takes a much longer than expected time to load. Some will blame this on Java and as a Java programmer, I know that Java is not the problem (TOS is also implemented on Java and loads faster). If someone gave me the TWS source code and a month, I'm sure I could make it more efficient.
I keep on rolling 3-6 month t-bills which pay me some but benefit over idle cash is that I can use the t-bills as collateral to trade while still earning interest.
Have no idea what technology you using, but something in your post does not make sense. I also run a fully automated algos, and bounce every weekend. You do not for weeks, and it makes no sense. Are you trading live?
Yes I trade live, and what in particular does not make sense? My platform handles all disconnects, re-connects, daily resets, it does know when a data server is offline. It's a purely event driven architecture so it does nothing much when no new market data arrive. It also knows exactly when to pull new daily fx conversion rates for pnl computation purposes. There is zero reason why a well thought out platform needs to be reset weekly.
Just to be clear, Java is our choice for TWS only. This is just one of our front ends. Our language of choice was always C++.
I only very recently, days ago actually, increased my IB account to $50k. I started there in May with $10k. I am not sure there even is a minimum. Commissions are laughably small at my level. I don't even notice them. If I ever get up to $1M, it will be some time in the fairly distant future. I don't see any problem with IB for small players. If I was with a broker that charged a flat $4.95 per trade, it would have chewed me to pieces. IB is not perfect, no; of course there are a few things I would like to see changed, but it's really not bad for small accounts, overall. If they happen to treat million dollar + clients differently, I could care less. If they have a preponderance of 7 figure accounts, that is to be expected. I think for small day traders, IB is quite satisfactory. And honestly it would not surprise me to find that they have thousands of accounts in my size range. Just sayin.
If the code was thoughtfully written, it should not cause too much garbage collector overhead for an application like TWS. I think there is some bloat in TWS, but I would not automatically blame that on Java without reviewing the code...I suspect it could be greatly optimized.
So then you have to split your capital among two accounts and if you like to hedge positions, what happens if one account goes down and you want to close a position in that down account? Then you have to outright short the underlying or spend money on puts. Say you only have $120k. If you put that all into an IB account, you can qualify for portfolio margin. If you split it, you're limited to RegT. If you run high margin, then you would have a higher chance of getting auto-liquidated if you split your funds among two accounts vs have it all in a single account. Also opens up a lot of tax complexities. I have been using IB since 2015. I've always been able to log in during market hours.