What Is Interactive Brokers?
Contents
It is inevitable for your safety to read the broker review before trading with the broker. You can find the Interactive Brokers review in detail below. Interactive Brokers, which was established in 1977 and is publicly traded and regulated in 6 top-tier jurisdictions, is a secure (minimal risk ) CFDs and FX broker.
Users of Interactive Brokers may buy and sell from a wide range of global markets, from equities to futures. Investors have access to 125 market hubs in more than 30 countries. Retail spot FX trading isn’t accessible to citizens of the United States.
Interactive Brokers provides an advanced, institutional-grade trading system and low fees to experienced CFD and FX traders looking for a worldwide multi-asset broker.
Is It Safe?
With perfect a Trust Score, the firm is deemed as a minimal risk broker. Interactive Brokers is a publicly-traded firm that doesn’t run a bank and is regulated by 6 top tier (strongly trusted), 0 tier-2, and 0 tier-3 (minimal trust) authorities. The firm is authorized by these six regulators:
- Securities Futures Commission (SFC)
- Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC)
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
- Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)
- Japanese Financial Services Authority (JFSA)
Interactive Brokers Review – Investment Options
IB provides a wide choice of worldwide marketplaces; yet, accessibility is dependent on the investor’s location and the organization with whom the investor is registering an account. Customers in the United States, Hong Kong, and Canada, for instance, are unable to trade CFDs. Through CFDs, the investor can trade crypto, but he or she can’t trade the underlying security directly (purchasing BTC). It is good to note that cryptocurrency CFDs are also not offered to retail traders from any platform’s United Kingdom entity, or to United Kingdom residents. See the list below for available investment options:
- CFD and FX trading
- A total of 7400 Tradeable Symbols
- A total of 105 Forex Pairs
- US Stock Trading
- Physical Cryptocurrency
- Int’l Stock Trading
Interactive Brokers Review – Fees and Other Charges
Interactive Brokers looks to provide fair prices at its monthly minimum activity costs; nevertheless, it is impossible to conduct a clear contrast because IB doesn’t reveal its typical FX spreads.
Due to the $2 necessary commission fee, trading fewer than a hundred thousand units of assets becomes significantly more pricey for lower deal amounts. If the investor trades fewer than fifty thousand units of currencies, IB’s minimal price for FX is equivalent to Saxo Bank’s $3 single purchase cost.
IB gathers pricing from 16 of the globe’s major interbank FX dealers for forex traders. Rather than marking up spreads, the firm imposes a for-each-trade fee varying from 16 to 40 dollars for each million round turn (8 to 20 dollars each side). This cost is equivalent to commission-based FX investing using agency execution offered by other brokers.
There seem to be possible reductions for active traders who achieve periodic trading volume requirements. For instance, if the investor trades more than 1 billion dollars in FX, the standard rate reduces to 1 and a half dollars for every order from 2 dollars, and if the investor trades more than 5 billion dollars each month, the standard rate cuts to 1 dollar for every order.
Whilst active traders may benefit from commission savings, newbies can find it more difficult to overcome expenses owing to monthly standard expenditure limitations, as well as their standard per-trade commission.
Interactive Brokers Review – Available Platforms and Instruments
IB’s main platform, Trader Workstation (TWS), is not simple to operate, yet it’s jam-packed with capabilities that include a wide range of trading options, as well as FX.
Trader Workstation has more than a hundred studies included in its charts, and that is much higher than the industry standard. The charting performance on Trader Workstation is undeniably remarkable.
For FX and CFD traders, IB’s Trader Workstation desktop interface allows complicated transactions. The Basket order, for one, is accessible, as are one-cancels-all and a variety of additional dependant orders. Regarding sophisticated techniques, these order types can be quite useful.
FXTrader is the major forex trading station inside Trader Workstation, and it gives investors entry to IB’s 92 CFDs on FX and more than a hundred cash FX pairings. Traders get to choose between FX CFDs and spot forex cash rates whenever they’re putting currency pairings to a watch list.
MT is not directly available from Interactive Brokers. Investors need to know programming languages and use APIs to be able to reach other systems like MetaTrader.
Whilst Trader Workstation desktop interface offers a large number of personalization options, the intricacy and vast list of potential setups might be overwhelming to inexperienced traders. The watch list, for instance, maybe set with more than five hundred distinct columns.
Interactive Brokers Review – Training
Although IB provides a wide range of high-caliber educational materials, sadly, the major focus of the firm’s training materials is not CFDs and FX.
Traders’ Academy webpage, Traders’ University, and IBKR Quant blog are among the company’s specialized educational offerings.
The Traders’ Academy webpage, for instance, provides a wide range of financial market areas with lectures and supporting videos grouped by level of experience.
Considering how complicated Trader Workstation is, it’s no wonder that the majority of the videos are platform lessons. IB has a Youtube page in addition to their site. Apart from platform training, there were relatively few videos about FX and CFDs, notwithstanding a wider range of resources relevant to different security classes.
To Sum Up
Ultimately, the platform is a fantastic option for experienced investors. Trader Workstation’s extensive, worldwide product portfolio, combined with competitive fees, makes Interactive Brokers a formidable opponent. We think that Interactive Brokers is the best option for corporate customers. This year, the firm was named Best in Class for Research, Professional Trading, and Investments.
Apart from experts, the required base activity cost as well as extraneous fees (for instance, market research) must be considered when considering if IB is a suitable fit for the investor’s trading strategies. Interactive Brokers is not suggested to small volume investors or newcomers to FX and CFD trading.
See also: Pepperstone Review
