I am in the middle of a "lost trade" situation with AF as we debate, using the JTrader platform web-based (FX is right on the money with his comments as others who have PM'd me with their details for "lost trades" using JTrader). So be very cautious if you choose to use JTrader...that is my advise to you. Chris BTW, I will keep you all informed if Advanced Futures corrects this problem I had on Thursday of last week on my FINAL TRADE TO GO FLAT FOR THE DAY.
sure much was written about the API and stuff of IB, but what API saves you if the system fails? Let's keep it in perspective, those guys who trade one or two contracts anyway would never cry about system failures anyway, what do they got to lose? In addition if they complained at IB they would tell them "yes we heard you and we work really hard on it" meaning in reality "we give a shit about you small a... trader". That is not what I think but you can see how serious complaints are taken recently. Server side nothing has been done at IB to improve things as of lately. So, we could discuss back and forth how well documented their API interface is. So what? If the system crashes and the phones are not answered: dump that broker. Its worth nothing? Wrong, it makes me lose a bunch of money when trading many contracts. I learned my lesson and will switch to a different broker and everyone else has got the choice according to their own trading styles. But allow me that I expessed my experience which I wish noone else had. Its frustrating to discuss with a desk trader at the brokerage your personal information instead of having your trade executed in order to get out. No API, no user groups, no forums are gonna change that. In order to be profitable you need to avoid those things happening in the LONG TERM. And it just happened too often recently that systems crashed!!! Its just enough. And that is about everything I have to say about this issue.
Huh? For the past year the IB servers have been extremely reliable. As a comparison I've had more minutes of outage from GLOBEX itself, my ISP and the phone company than IB.
AMT4SWA, I'm sure Advanced Futures will solve your problem if there was a problem that's not your fault. AF, and Mark Hyman are very honest people in my opinion. Good luck,
Honesty is a very good recommendation. I just have a problem with these brokerages in as much as THEY DON'T SEEM TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THEIR CUSTOMERS. Anyone in retail or wholesale sales will tell you, one has to kiss ass to keep customers. While some clients are a pain and frustrating, we are paying them for SERVICE. If they don't treat their clients with honesty and decency they will be toast in the future. Especially with lower and lower rates.
So if they were nice and understanding....it would not matter if you did not get your money back? Lets say they admitted it was there fault...would you be understanding enough to eat your loss? This is about money...and nothing to do with the niceness..... Honesty and decency are subjective and there are 2 sides to every story. Lets get real here......this is about M O N E Y Michael B.
I guess that AF and/or RCG might be in trouble if they admit any problems with JTrader. They will prefer to say something like "must have been your ISP" or "must have been your OS" (Win2K, WinXP, Win2003).
Electric Savant... Excuse me but of course its about MONEY. Nobody should be on this board if it's not about money.
Wow, its always surprising how some people continue on an on with guessing whether problems ocurred with a certain platform and contiue bashing certain products they know (almost) nothing about. On the other side they keep on hanging on to the platforms which obviously caused most grief to its users. Maybe its because they have (almost) nothing to lose with 1 or 2 contracts. What they dont realize is that this attitude just magnifies with larger size trading. Funny thing. Maybe same applies to the market itself....most hang on to losing attitudes and either never step up from their 1 or 2 contract trades or kill their entire capital. The few that actually make money are striving for the best. No one ever argued there is a perfect platform. But there are, no doubt, few platforms out there who are counted to be the best at this time, and J-Trader belongs to them, regardless of what a few people have to say about it. On the other side, there are platforms that have shown to be unstable as of lately and TWS is one of them, otherwise people would not complain so much (as a reference check the chat logs of othernet's IB channel, there you can count the system outages day by day).