IB

[William]

Thinking about opening an account with Interactive brokers. Anybody with pros and cons about IB?

[DogDayTrader]

I don't have any experience with them, but do like the fact that:

"Interactive Brokers offers electronic access to stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds and funds on over 80 market destinations worldwide from a single IB Universal Account®."

Glanced at their fees and they don's seem too bad, but they do have a 10K minimum to open an account and they also have monthly minimums for commissions. This being siad, if your an active investor this could give you access to more markets and securities than you already have.

If you do open an account, lplease et me know what you think about it.

[MarGuy1]

I'm a trader, not a long term investor. So if you're an active trader like me, IB is definitely the best broker I have dealt with. They give their customers the same access the large professional traders have, I get to trade from 4 am till 8 pm, with no blockout periods what so ever, they never had an outage (been trading with them for 4 months), almost no disconnections (extremely rare and could be my ISP), they have a great application for trading (TWS) that have all what a trader would need for smooth straight forward trading, you get real time account information (balance, trades, etc), their executions are lightning fast and very trustworthy (they give you the best possible price), and they have the largest shortable stock list of any online broker I have seen (although for some reason, almost all biotechs stock is not available for shorting after a surge, but I'm pretty sure this will be the case with all brokers). Finally, their prices are dirt cheap since they don't spend a lot of money on advertisement campaigns, etc. So what would any trader need more than all that in an online broker. Hope this helped.

[ramsforums]

If you trade small volume then trading cost is low. Again it depends on cost price of stock

if you buy a stock the price $10 or $20 then trading cost is 0.5 cents ($0.005) per share. But if you are buying penny stocks and huge volume the cost is 0.5%. so u need to weigh.

[davie08]

Well I just started with them they have very cheap commissions and the have market data that can be used for free if you make a reasonable amount of trades so out of the ones Ive tried there the best but ive only tries td and qtrade which arent even useable for daytraders.

[Blastoff]

I ma using IB, the work station is pretty awesome. They charge only 1$ for 200 shares. For penny stocks , they charge 0.5 percent of the amount. But i recommend if someone plays the major stocks, it is quite cheaper than any other broker.