I recently tried to switch back to IB due to other brokers pay no interest for the cash sweep vehicle. When I tried to open the account, I never received the account verification email. Tried both my gmail and outlook email address. Waited more than a day and checked spam folders. Does anyone else experience the same issue, or its just me?
I takes a while for IB to verify new accounts. I waited for about 2 weeks before it was verified. I have no idea why.
I am actually at the very beginning of the process and just waiting for the account verification email to verify my email address so that I can continue. It should not take more than a few minutes for them to send out the emails. It wasn't like this before.
It's IB. They are incredibly disorganized. That confirmation email is not always sent. And then you might just get a welcome email saying that your account is opened. Happened to me quite a few times. Don't worry they will open the account for you. They are suckers for accounts; they will open it for anybody or anything. They are like a high-class bucketshop for all.
You do have a point in that they only care about new customers. Keeping the current ones is not really important. Take the fact that the commission tiers reset every month, so if you did 300k+ last month, you still start the next month like it's your first. Lightspeed has this figured out.
They don't care about anybody, new or old customers, or even their own employees, nobody. All they care about is money. That means paying their workers peanuts (you should read the glassdoor reviews about them) and extorting as much money as possible from customers with whatever BS excuses that they can think of while pocketing the difference. They don't even care when you leave cuz they know for every customer that leaves, there would be 10 waiting to join fooled by that Barron's ranking of them as the No. 1 in discount brokerage with the lowest commissions.
I can echo this sentiment when IB was advertising here. All their marketing people cared about was new accounts even though the majority of the ads they ran didn't even say anything at all about opening a new account. It was bizarre. And they had absolutely no interest in interacting with any of their current customers on this site who were asking questions or needing support, even though people are bringing up issues here every day. It's sad really. They are the only brokerage firm in 20 years that I just couldn't make happy no matter what I tried.
I know of a TH broker on the PHLX that has a $3MM 401K all in matched IBKR shares. I think their compensation package is better than most.