What about Interactive Brokers?

Anyone using them? Your experience?

Interactive Brokers is probably the best ECN broker out there. Their platform isn’t the greatest, but many institutional funds have accounts with them, and they have a very high net cap. Out of all the brokers, bucketshops, ecn’s, your money is the safest with InteractiveBrokers. Their commissions are good but their customer help is bad. They only want experienced investors. If you are looking for an ECN broker that is more helpful, and user friendly, MB trading or HotSpot FX are the other 2 I would choose from.

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Thanks Yung!

My brother trades with them (he is a full time stock trader btw) and he says its the best broker that he ever had but I must worn you that they do not have a good leverage for forex… actually its pretty fair (its 2%…50:1) and “you are required to have a minimum of $2,000 or USD equivalent of securities equity with loan value or commodities net liquidation value to open a new position.”

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On their page I see 40:1
http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=margin

and when trying their demo initial margin requirement is about 500$ for 20K base unit so are you sure you need 2000$ ? 2000$ is required for opening an account for sure.

2000 $ is required to trade on margin. And if you combine Interactive Brokers with NinjaTrader trading platform, you have a winning combination :slight_smile:

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i agree they are decent brokers, a lot of material written about them esp after MF global debacle & rehypothecation but their business model is comp. different.

As stated earlier Interactive Brokers is geared toward professionals. If you are completely new to FOREX or online trading in general this is not the place to start. The application process is intimidating. A more customer friendly “retail” broker with plenty of free training material would be better suited to such traders. Also, their proprietary trading software is not for the faint of heart. Customer service is geared toward helping you solve specific issues.

That said, their reliability, cost, and performance is almost impossible to beat. I’ve been with them for several years and I’ve got no plans on leaving. In addition, I’ve noticed that their customer service has improved markedly over the last couple years.

Minimum to open an account and accrue interest is 10K. Minimum for margin trades in 2K unrestricted. For this you get the lowest spreads and best execution in the industry. Max leverage as set by regulators in the US is 40:1 with lower limits on exotic pairs. The limits change periodically based on market conditions. Really, if you are trading with more that 10:1 you aren’t going to last long in this game so I don’t see this as serious limitation.

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