I am leaving InteractiveBrokers after 6 months due bad experiences

- This broker and their servers are totally overload, keep that in mind, i talked to the customer services in Swiss and they said that... I think it is because of the removing minimum fund (like 10-20k before) requirement. Even to get approved it took 3-4 weeks.

- Their trading software is the probably the worst trading software: TWS. If you click a ticker symbol it takes years to load charts and many times it doesn't load. If you contact the customer support 2-3 days later comes the answer "there was a backend bug, it should work now" and 1-2 weeks later same problem occurrs again. They fix again, and a while later you got the same problem again. And they suggest me to remove VWAP, because VWAP causes many problems in TWS... I traded months long without any indicators.

- Customer service is slow and they can't help for specific problems. I mean, many times i felt like i am talking to someone, who has never heard TWS. If you ask a question on phone, they are checking the their FAQ pages and trying to help and in that while you are losing bunch of time. As a day trader every single minute is important for me and if i stuck because of the software from stone age, i need immediately help but you can forget it on IB.

- They don't accept but their servers are way overload. Data is very slow. If you have many tickers in your watch list, you have to pay extra. Kinda like 30 bucks monthly for every 50 tickers in watchlist or so, i forgot the exact cost, sorry. But still the data is laggy and software freezes many times. There are many topics in this forum that many people have the same problems, but IB doesn't accept the reality.

- I don't want to talk much about order execution speed but if i give an order on booktrader, software freezes 1-2 secs long and then i hear "order filled". It is interesting.

- Short sell list is not enough. There is no barrowable shares for many daily top runners. And idk why but borrawable shares dissapear on the market opening . For example stock X had 750k shares to borrow and when market opens, even there is no volume (5k volume in first min), those 750k shares dissapear somehow. It was suspicious for me but since i am not a much experienced trader, i don't want to blade IB for that. But according to my experiences you can short the daily top runners 90% of the time only in pre market... And because of that you are being forced to short earlier.

- Some tickers in EU is not added there. You need to tell the customer support that they add those tickers... But many blue chip stocks from EU are added already. I just don't understand why we should do the broker's job... Why don't have they up-to-date list idk.

 

What will you choose now ?

 

I am still looking and researching all brokers and platforms. What would you recommend to me based on my complaints above? And are you using IB either? If yes, can you tell me your experiences?

 

Had no experience with them.
Im in for the swings, so all of the above is irrelevant to me.
(there's Saxo Bank, but reviews doesn't shine & then there is all kinds of buckets shops)

 

Use DasTrader for IB as front end and all your problems would be solved

 

As much as I would like to bash other brokers, you can't assume the slowness is a result of their trading software or routing. In many cases, it is the path your internet takes to the data center. I have seen delays from the middle east on some users and from other, very little. One test showed a 3.5-second delay from Israel to the UK before crossing to the NJ data center. Another user from the middle east did not have that delay. One test from Texas shows 2 hops and a very tiny delay, but another user in Texas had 12 hops and up to a 60ms delay. Still a very good connect but this has to do with your internet provider and current internet traffic, not your broker.

 

OP could try using his smartphone as a WiFi hotspot and comparing fills.

 

@Robert Morse

Well, i tried many different internet provider (phone, home's internet, wifi hotspot public, starbucks's inter) but it didn't help to me. I used many different devices in my tests (iphone 10, ipad 7 and 2 differet notebooks) but no solution.

If you mean this problem is because of my distance to their services, this can be reason, but not sure. I won't give any broker or trader software name here because people are so much paranoid and think i am promoting... But i am using demo version of different platforms and they work incredibely fast! I ask myself why i suffered months long on IB...

 

You should use European data servers. It won't solve all the latency problems but it might help.

 

There is an option in TWS that you can change the servers but it doesn't help at all. I didn't notice any difference. But thanks.