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Overall
The ONLY things good about IB is its tight spread and low commission (BUT they charge you extra commissions for converting your profits back to the funding currency of your account) and their customer service in Canada. The customer service for IB US for Forex is still horrible and totally clueless. But their Java platform for Forex, FXTrader is one of the WORST among all the ECN brokers; it's slow and full of bugs. When their system is busy, when you click on a currency pair in FXTrader, the order will show up for the wrong currency pair and because the software is slow it takes a while to show up and you don't catch it in time. I have ended up trading the wrong currency for so many times because of this bug. And also even if you save your settings but the placeholders for currency pairs will keep switching all over the place in FXTrader each time you log in so the same currency pair is never in the same place twice and you always have to find them just to make sure you are trading the right pair. They have gone through so many different version upgrades but they never fixed these bugs. I have reported these bugs to their technical support but they have always denied them. I think they leave these bugs there on purpose to trip traders up to enter more errorneous trades so they can get more commissions from traders. I mean there are other brokers who use Java for their trading platforms and they are never this problematic.
And also their roll-over interest rate is a total rip-off. They only pay interest for both sides for only a few selected currency pairs. On many of the pairs, they pay you interest on only one side of transaction and even charge you interest if you are on the other side, for example for USD, if you are Long in USD, you don't get paid any interest but if you are short in USD, they charge you interest UNLESS you have $million of capital deposited with them.
All in all, AVOID them if you are a new trader starting out. For new traders who are thinly capitalized, IB is not the choice. They are the bucket shop among ECN brokers for small capital retail traders; all they do is take money from you. They cater more to high volume, high capital traders or institutions. So consider them when you are more loaded.
Overall
Some of the tightest spreads in the industry. IB has an excellent reputation, but it is not for the new trader. They neglected to tell me they shut their platform down at night for maintenance. Since my programmers wrote a program to specifically trade on their API, this was a major disappointment. So, it is not for automated trading, until they can get around this issue. Also, the API kept disconnecting. A real bummer. If you trade manually and have your own platform or are willing to lease one of the platforms they offer, this could be a good choice. They offer trading stocks, options, futures, forex and you can track all this on their proprietary "Traders Workstation".
Overall
I have a live account since 1 year. Works very good. No major problems actually.
1. thightes spreads
2. 0.5 Pips steps
3. I like the TWS Platform. Its very nice but also very complex. Also the Web-Trader is acceptable but no chating support.
4. true ECN/STP
5. very fast executions
6. good deposit/withdraw
7. very good support
8. high reputation
9. cheap commissions for high volume traders (0.2 - 0.1 Pip per side)
10. you can also trade other securities like stocks, futures, .. (no CFDs)
There are only some disadvantages:
1. you cannot trade during the rollover time
2. For IDEAPLPRO minimum trade size is too high (e.g. $25K).
3. For lower volumes IDEAL much has bigger spreads (mostly +2 Pips) and higher comissions (1 Pips)
4. the minimum commission is too high ($2.5)
5. no hedging
In all, i can recomment this broker if you want an allround platform for stocks, forex, futures, options, .. and if you have a bigger trading account (>$20,000)
