Be very careful with IB. They are not actually chipper than other brokers. They could actually be much more expensive.
They have so to call it “Daily exposure fee” which means that if you have short positions they can start charging you % from your account on a daily bases. If your short positions increases the fee will increase as well. You don’t really know when they will start charging you, but when they start it will be bad.
So when shit hit the fan IB is making it even worst.
Meh, so to be fair IB seems to have really great risk control. Yes they will let you leverage up to like 6-10X, depending on how you do it, and you can buy a ton of derivatives or whatever. But if you start doing this risky stuff, guess what, it’s risky! When you preview the impact of a potential trade in TWS you can see any additional “exposure fee” you will be charged (fee over the normal trading cost), I have never been charged an exposure fee, because I’ve never done anything their system red flagged (and all posters here know I do some fairly risky stuff). Apparently later down the road, if conditions change, you might start being charged an exposure fee. Everyone knows they have a history of tightening margin when times are bad, so take that into consideration when putting trades on while times are good. Anyhow, I Googled and the first thread that came up was some dipshit who was in a 3X short VIX ETF , and was crying about getting an extra risk fee of $10/day. Sorry, but that seems perfectly fair given the volatility of volatility these days.
You IBKR TWS users need to change your trade notifications to the new British butler voice. He’s really cool “order filled”, “order partially filled”, etc. Much better than the crappy Windows 1998-ish sound fx.
Wanted to point out that IB will have some ‘free’ market data options/packages for random currencies, countries, exchanges, etc that you might know you’ll never trade in. Just wanted to say there’s no harm in signing up for the free data since (even if you may not need it). Anytime the price of market data changes IB will send you a notification/email and automatically cancel data subscriptions that had been free in the past, but will start costing $x per month next quarter or something.
Also, yes the phone support is nothing to brag about, but they have plenty of webinars, videos, training courses, etc for beginners and advanced users of their TWS product. Honestly been meaning to check out a couple of these webinars myself!
Yeah, I’m signed up for these. Korean derivatives and stuff, never know when you might need Samsung futures!
It still annoys me they don’t have a global index package (S&P500, CSI300, Bovespa, FTSE100, an index of global equities in total, etc). You have to get them one by one, and there are huge things missing like Shanghai Composite (they have zero China indices). I emailed them about this multiple times and they just made up excuses.