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Interactive Brokers - experiences and opinions

After two weeks of tracking every trade I was confident that the "disappearing money" was just poor math on my part and everything seemed to be fine so I forgot about it, then today my balance was roughly $100 less than what it should have been after exiting all my trades and booking profit. I wrote down my balance, took another trade, lost $17, and my balance was down $37!!! Buggers! Everything is in base currency so there's no not accounting for exchange rates. Damnit! Now I have to wait for the trade confirmations to be made available so I can prove it.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
Hello,

I'm working on a new client's account over at interactive brokers, and I'm having a hard time understanding how to calculate the per pip value of a trade. Does anyone know how to do this?

P.S. This may be the least user friendly platform ever!
Quoting thehouse
Hello, I'm working on a new client's account over at interactive brokers, and I'm having a hard time understanding how to calculate the per pip value of a trade. Does anyone know how to do this? P.S. This may be the least user friendly platform ever!
The calculation of a pip value (with the exception to SpreadBetting accounts) should be pretty standard, irrespective of which broker you are with:

Here’s how:

The profit or loss per pip is always calculated based on the quote currency. The quote currency is the second currency in the pair – eg USD in the EURUSD currency pair.

P&L per pip = trade volume x pip size

e.g. for EURUSD 1 lot trade:
P&L per pip = 100,000 x 0.0001 = USD10

Alternatively, if you are rather tired (perhaps after a long day of trading) and want the answers without any fluff, you can always opt for an online calculator.
Update: By Monday my account showed the correct amount. What a waste of my time tracking down non-existent errors. Damn this antique TWS software that can't do basic math!

Update: The bad math just started again. $30 went missing as soon as I took my first trade this evening after a technical problem on there end that wasn't accepting orders. Maybe it's every Thursday and I just haven't noticed before.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
Update: Tracking my cash in base currency and all trades and commissions very closely, it appears that at day end they are applying the full amount of monthly accrued interest each day, not just what was accrued on that day.

i.e. My accrued interest was -$17 for the month and at the end of day the closing balance was $17 less. My new accrued interest is -$19 and my account is now an additional $19 short, not the $2 difference it should be, and indeed I am down $36, the total of $17 and $19 even though these are running totals, not daily totals. If this is indeed what is happening (I need more days to confirm), this adds up to hundreds of dollars a month. However, on the daily reports only the $2 difference is reported and at this point I haven't identified where they are hiding the remaining amount they are stealing from our accounts.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
This cannot be true. Such a stealing would already be public domain and IB shut down.
I personally don't understand every details of my IB statements, but every time I spent some time doing math I always concluded IB was right.
  • Post #507
  • Quote
  • Edited Jun 25, 2014 4:08am Jun 24, 2014 8:31am | Edited Jun 25, 2014 4:08am
Quoting jagui
This cannot be true. Such a stealing would already be public domain and IB shut down. I personally don't understand every details of my IB statements, but every time I spent some time doing math I always concluded IB was right.
After I last posted I was downloading my statements every day and comparing them with my own totals which I keep a running balance of four or more times a day, and an extra $10 per day flowed back into my account until I was back where I should be and I cannot figure out where the money came from on my statements but I was happy to have my balance correct again, at least as far as the last two weeks are concerned.

Then last night an extra $27 disappeared between the time I went to bed and the time I got up which is exactly my monthly interest. I have a friend who's a retired auditor and I'm going to see if he'll be willing to look at my statement history and see if he can make sense of it. It doesn't help that they don't have a consistent "print" time. It's usually around 3 p.m. EST but yesterday's statement was printed at 8:15 a.m., neither of which correspond with a normal North American "day end" time.

Update: I've exited my last two trades, and upon leaving each trade I was short another $27 each.

Update: I exited another trade up $27 and my account balance was the same as when I'd entered the trade.

Update: Yet another $27 disappeared when I exited another trade. WTF!?!

Update: Some of my money reappeared while I was away from my computer -- I'm guessing it happened during the midnight system reset.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
My cash balance increased random amounts throughout the beginning of last week until it was back where is should be, then it started to dip towards the end of the week until my cash balance ended up down $45 at Friday close. Today my account opened short another $30 more making my cash balance $75 down from where it should be. The amounts my account went up and down didn't equate to anything so I have to abandon my monthly interest amount being deducted daily theory.

Adding to my random account balance fun is a data spike on Yen and Pound pairs within seconds of last Friday's close which doesn't appear on other data sources. It simultaneously triggered an entry and stop costing me $30.

Finally, though I manage stocks through Questrade because Interactive Brokers doesn't have RRSP, RIF, or TFSA accounts, I do use Interactive Broker charts for technical analysis (Questrade charts are even worse) and three months after the April 2nd Google stock split they still haven't updated Google historical prices to reflect the split making technical analysis for Google stock impossible. They did update Apple after their stock split in June so I have no idea how they could have overlooked Google. (That's still better than Questrade where I have to contact them to >manually< correct the book value every time a stock splits because they will update the number of shares but consistently fail to update the purchase price.)
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
Quoting KADC
My cash balance increased random amounts throughout the beginning of last week until it was back where is should be, then it started to dip towards the end of the week until my cash balance ended up down $45 at Friday close. Today my account opened short another $30 more making my cash balance $75 down from where it should be. The amounts my account went up and down didn't equate to anything so I have to abandon my monthly interest amount being deducted daily theory. Adding to my random account balance fun is a data spike on Yen and Pound pairs...
You noticed fluctuations in your cash balance too? I noticed the same thing too. All of sudden I would notice -ve balances in my account balances for various currencies. I asked them to explain these -ve balances as they did not arise from my trading activities at all and they claimed they are from accrued interest from my trading and they are calculated for everyday that the transaction is not settled even though I only held the transaction over 1 day of cut-off, they charged me FIVE DAYS of interest because it was over a weekend. And not only that I still cannot reconcile my cash balance even with the accrued interest and when I asked them further, they threatened to close my account and kick me out as a client. LOL I suspect that with the reduced volatility in the market nowadays, traders are not trading as much as before and they are not making as much money in commissions anymore so they are tweaking their interest charging mechanism to charge us more accrued interest because more and more of us are holding positions over a longer period of time.

After several years of being with them, maybe it's time for me to change brokers.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
Quoting card
Some very valid issues here. But, 1. Unless you go institutional or to a bucket shop, you won't get these tight spreads and commissions. 2. Can change the currency you hold your deposits in, at any time. 3. Can trade other products. 4. Interest in paid on positive balances in any currency. Interest is only charged on your negative balances. So, it doesn't cost you anything to hold other currencies, as long as you don't borrow another currency to do so. I don't need super accurate charts or quote feeds so their charting issues don't bother me.
That is NOT true. Interest is NOT paid on +ve balances on none of the major currencies except AUD and NZD and yet interest is charged on -ve balances on ALL of the currencies from IB.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
Quoting Forexia
{quote} You noticed fluctuations in your cash balance too? I noticed the same thing too. All of sudden I would notice -ve balances in my account balances for various currencies. I asked them to explain these -ve balances as they did not arise from my trading activities at all and they claimed they are from accrued interest from my trading and they are calculated for everyday that the transaction is not settled even though I only held the transaction over 1 day of cut-off, they charged me FIVE DAYS of interest because it was over a weekend. And not...
The first time I noticed the problem I went on "livechat" with support for 45 minutes and whoever I was talking to was just spouting nonsense about how I'm holding balances in assorted currencies (usually less than $100 except active trades - I'm pretty good at keeping that cleaned up so they don't get out of hand) and it's fluctuations in the value of these residual amounts that are causing my cash balance to fluctuate even though it would take unheard of price variances in the 10% range to do so. The person became increasingly abusive like somehow I, graduating top of my college class in advanced accounting (and if Canadian CGA requirements didn't need a 4-year university degree I'd be one), didn't know how to do simple math. I asked the person, given that it was so "obvious", to calculate the discrepancy between my opening balance and current balance or between any two time frames of his choosing (given that they use variable end-of-day for our reports) which should be easy since I'd only made a couple of trades that "day" and he or she just spewed more nonsense for which I did the math for everything he or she said and when I proved it didn't work out they terminated the support session.

Given their is no realistic alternative in Canada (though I've read that OANDA spread charges work out to be no worse than Interactive Brokers commission fees) I have been forced to chalk this up to the cost of doing business, but I'm still trying to prove what's going on without resorting to a professional audit which would cost me more than what they've stolen from me. I thought I was onto something with the erroneous interest deductions and I've also considered that they deduct negative currency variances against the base currency cash balance but never the reverse when base currency (CAD in my case) increases but the math didn't hold up to support either theory. As far as I can tell they just randomly take money from our accounts and randomly put it back in, though I've yet to see my account balance over what it should be so that rules out strictly random behaviour else the errors wouldn't always result in shortages.

It seems we've meandered away from the topic of charting problems I created this thread for, but since the other Interactive Broker threads haven't had a post since 2011 at the most recent I wonder if I can change the title of this thread to simply "Interactive Brokers Problems".
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
It seems that if you have multiple problems you need to ask each individually, even if they are related and even if they are all components of the same issue, else technical support addresses only part then tries to close the ticket. I've had to reopen the same ticket four times now for problems relating to viewing my news feeds.

Back to chart problems, this is the response to my notifying Interactive Brokers that Google (GOOGL) historical stock data has not been updated to reflect the 2:1 stock split and thus the chart is rendered with a huge gap in price which make technical analysis impossible:
Quote
According to our records the GOOGL chart has now been adjusted.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sincerely
Rico
Interactive Brokers
The problem with that reply being that the chart is in fact still wrong. What "records" could Rico possibly have consulted and why didn't he simply load the chart and look to see if the "records" were correct or not is a mystery, but I have reopened that ticket as well.

Here's a screenshot which illustrates a couple of other TWS charting problems besides the Google data being wrong, such as any "text commentary" you enter will disappear as soon as you close the chart. So will trend lines for that matter if you use any version of TWS newer than Build 930.6, Sep 26, 2012 3:02:57 PM (which I keep a backup of). They used to have a link to prior builds but they took it down in around December 2012 and it's quite a hassle to get them to give you the link. For a while I was actually working with the build team to resolve a couple of trend line rendering errors but they ultimately decided that TWS trend lines didn't need to be accurate -- approximations were fine -- and since current builds don't retain trend lines the multisession rendering errors were not an issue.

Another issue is how all colours in all studies will change (randomly) every time you add a new study to your chart. You also used to be able to view 5-year charts but now the furthest you can go back is 3 which really isn't sufficient (as far as I'm concerned) when selecting stocks to add to your portfolio so I look at the 10-year charts on TMX (Toronto Stock Exchange site) while I'm checking a stock's financials.

I disabled auto-updates and I haven't felt like messing with a new build since last fall so perhaps these problems have been fixed by now and I'd love to hear from other TWS users if that's the case, otherwise it's not worth my time to mess with a new build of TWS that may have even worse issues.

Google daily chart.
Attached Image (click to enlarge)
Click to Enlarge Name: Google stock price still not updated.jpg Size: 419 KB
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
Technical support claims the Google charts are rendering correctly on their end. Can someone please look at a daily chart for GOOGL and tell me if it looks like my screen shot or if the prices have in fact been adjusted.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
I really love these IB bashing threads, here and at ET.
Quoting KADC
{quote} The first time I noticed the problem I went on "livechat" with support for 45 minutes and whoever I was talking to was just spouting nonsense about how I'm holding balances in assorted currencies (usually less than $100 except active trades - I'm pretty good at keeping that cleaned up so they don't get out of hand) and it's fluctuations in the value of these residual amounts that are causing my cash balance to fluctuate even though it would take unheard of price variances in the 10% range to do so. The person became increasingly abusive...
Yup EXACTLY what I noticed in IB. They would randomly take money away the account and then they would put it back whenever they feel like it all under the guise of their accrued interest which according to their website is subject to change without notice so you never know how much they are charging you currently. And the most recent time that I discussed this with them, just like with you, they got abusive and threatened to kick me out as a client. And thanks

So now I am doing the following:

1. Monitor my cash balance daily at the end of each trading day. And I am taking daily screenshots of my Account Balance window. IB states on their website that any accrued interest accrued for the month is charged to my account on the 3rd business of next month. So IF there is any accrued interest that I had to incur due to the non-moving market these days, I should see them by that 3rd business day. And if there was no accrued interest incurred the previous month, then I shouldn't see any difference between the 2nd business day and the 3rd business of this month. And if I see one more debit that shouldn't be there, I am closing my account with them. Even if I can't find another suitable broker in Canada thanks to the wonderful Canadian government squareheads who decided to follow their equally stupid US counterpart, I would rather have no broker than being with a broker that steals money from me. If they don't think they are making enough money then they should just increase their commission rate and risk losing clients because they are gonna lose clients anyway if they continue to have these "unexplained discrepancy" in people's cash balance.

2. Try not to incur any accrued interest. From now on, I am always going to close my position before the cutoff. And if needs to be, I will re-open the trade after the cut-off, I will incur an extra commission and possible losses due to the gap but if I am going to have these funds stolen from IB anyway, I might as well lose them to the market and in a clearly seen commission charge instead of in unexplanable and never accountable "interest charges".

Until I find a better broker, this is what I am going to do.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
And I agree in changing the title of this thread to "Interactive Brokers Problems" due to the multiplitude of problems with that broker. Everything from their TWS, charts, statements, account balance calculations, everything is a muddle and you have to constantly guess and try to reconcile on their own.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
Quoting Forex37
I really love these IB bashing threads, here and at ET.
Glad to see I am not the only one who's suffering at this broker's hands.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
Quoting Forexia
{quote} Glad to see I am not the only one who's suffering at this broker's hands.
Would you please do me a favour and look at a daily chart for Google (GOOGL) and tell me if the chart is still broken (drops from ~$1,200 to ~$600) or if it is, in fact, fixed as technical support claims? I don't see how my installation of TWS could be responsible but that's what technical support is claiming.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
Quoting KADC
{quote} Would you please do me a favour and look at a daily chart for Google (GOOGL) and tell me if the chart is still broken (drops from ~$1,200 to ~$600) or if it is, in fact, fixed as technical support claims? I don't see how my installation of TWS could be responsible but that's what technical support is claiming.
I can't because I don't subscribe to their stock data so I can't load up the chart for Google, sorry. But I can tell you this has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with your TWS installation, just one more BS hoop that they make you jump through so they won't have to fix the real cause of the problem. I used to get these kind of price spikes all the time, sometimes several times in a day when I was using charts API that get datafeed from IB. Although my problem was due to the problem-ridden API interface from my chart software provider that just doesn't read price data properly and then corrupts the historical price database even the price data on IB's side is correct. But in your case it's IB who didn't update the historical price database which I will explain below. TWS is just a display program how could it display correct data when it's the price database that's providing the data that's the problem?

When this "Rico" guy talks about "records", he is referring to the historical price database where the chart is pulling the data from. It's actually an Access DBA file but can be opened using Excel and it contains countless and countless rows of data which are referred as "records". All the charting software that uses IB price data get their data from these database files that were saved with the name of the security, stock or Forex pair or whatnot. When one of the price records which is comprised of four price data "Open, Close, High, Low" is corrupted and all it takes is just ONE of these price data to be wrong, then the whole entire record is bad and that's when you get a HUGE spike that skews up the whole chart and all of the indicators that go with it. In your case, it's just simply that IB didn't adjust the price records in that DBA file and that caused that bad spike and it's IB who would have to fix it.

To fix those price records is actually a very painstaking process (probably why IB is so reluctant in doing it and instead insist that you reinstall TWS and hoping that the problem would miraculously go away when your TWS is reinstalled LOL). They first would have to erase an entire day of price records where the spike happened and then add manually into that DBA file the correct price records for that entire day one record at a time and they would have to make sure the data is seamless and continues fine from the previous day and continues correctly to the day after. I know because I used to have to do this ALL the time to fix those bad spikes when I was using a charting software that uses IB data because both my charting software provider and IB refused to fix the data and neither one was willing to address and resolve the problem so I had to find the solution myself.

Long story short, if IB really did the process above and fixed the problem then it's fixed the spike will be gone and you can verify that yourself with any version of TWS but if it's not fixed, then no matter how many times you reinstall TWS, the spike will obviously still be there. Solution: Try to use a charting software that does NOT use price data from IB.
Make your losses in demo. Earn your profits live.
Quoting Forexia
{quote} I can't because I don't subscribe to their stock data so I can't load up the chart for Google, sorry. ...I used to get these kind of price spikes all the time...
Stock data is free -- I don't even know how you could unsubscribe to it, but anyway, the problem isn't a data spike, it is a 2:1 stock split (i.e. twice the shares worth half the price). Standard practice is to adjust all historical data to reflect the new price but Interactive Brokers have failed to do so in this one case while other stocks (such as the more recent 7:1 Apple split or the much older CCT split from last year) have had their historical prices updated correctly.

On the other hand, Google is hardly an unknown stock and certainly if other people were experiencing this problem it would have been reported (and presumably dealt with) months ago but judging from the tiny size of the settings files which store chart data, actual price data isn't retained by TWS so it can't be a cache issue.

Anyway, let me ask you about your TWS charts: Do they retain trend line data after you close them (without saving the chart) and after you close TWS so the lines are still there when you open the chart in a new session? I can live without TWS FOREX trend lines being saved (I rely on NetDania Power Charts) but I have trend line data for several hundred stocks which I do not wish to lose. Every update since September 25th, 2012 has not retained chart data which is why I rely on this build and can't reasonably update.
You can always make money tomorrow provided you don't lose it today.
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