I have been an IB client for more than six months now. Except for maintaining a few portfolio positions & juggling them, I have done little trade. My interest was in testing the api.
IB started out of an business center. They did not even have a local helpdesk, when I started. I forgot my password once and they called me from Hong Kong to reset it!!
That said, pricing has improved a lot recently, as a post above noted, making it quite competitive unless you are a hotshot trader whom a broker will handover his head on a platter!
What I find irreplaceable are bracket orders & trailing stops.
Regarding not getting option or futures executions, as someone posted above, futures & options have to be enabled on IB. Its a regulatory issue, requires submission of networth certificate. All brokers ask for it....many are lax about it...IB is not.
Support is a known problem with IB.....but coming from a high cost economy like US, its to be expected. That has led IB to be very documentation intensive. Almost everything is documented on the website. I expect they are not taking that route in India, as support will be comparatively cheaper. I won't find it surprising if in a few years IB support happens out of India
However, they are basically a self-service sort of company. If you are a lazy sort of fellow, well....you must learn to pay for valet service or expect it free at a place with five star prices
IB's feed is acceptable, though its not tick data. IB updates prices roughly three times a second. You can have about 100 active symbol feeds on normal account. More if yours is a high brokerage account. Minute resolution for two days, 30 Minutes for a week, hourly bars for a month and 180 days daily history bars. Number of data requests for historical feed are limited to 60 requests per minute, more than that and you are throttled/fined in delay time. If you have higher data needs than that, you obviously need reuters/bloomberg and obviously can pay for them.
I use free feeds for historical data. Yahoo & Google EOD/RT/IEOD plus IB feed during trading are a good combination, though one does have to struggle with symbol translation while backtesting, but its an acceptable burden seen in terms of what they are offering.
API is amazing....a lot can be done! I expect to start active trading around Jan-Feb, when I get all my tools in place.
My personal opinion, every newbie should use IB, no matter price, no matter software....for one thing alone....for their paper trading engine....their webinars.....who among Indian brokers teaches newbies beyond order basics....who provides a way to paper trade......paper trading software requirement should be legislated by law......maybe we would not have so many losers in stock exchanges
And everyone who wishes to semi-automate or fully automate their trading, has a trading plan & strategy and some coding skill should definitely use IB, period!
Just my two cents....naw...currency risk there....just my two paise worth
Sanjay.
