I'll have to take what I can get on Sunday ...
I misunderstood Interactive Brokers' client accounts with "master accounts" like the one I have. For other brokerages I've used (Thinkorswim and Tastyworks) you set up the client account separately then get it hooked into the master account with what's called a "limited trading authorization."
Interactive Brokers pretty much requires you to send an email from within their app, Trader Workstation. You theoretically can do the "hook in another account" but in our case it would have taken 2 weeks ... we goofed when creating his account and set up different trading permissions than on my account. So it would have taken over this current weekend to get that fixed, then over next weekend to get his account hooked into mine.
Not only that ... we were looking for a workaround for this slowdown and got bad information from the standard support line at IB! They told my client that there was a 3-day hold on wire transfers!
This didn't sound right and I called the "advisor line" and got the actual information: there is no hold for trading, but for 3 days you can't move the money out to any other brokerage or bank account.
Sheesh.
In general, Interactive Brokers is a 1980's firm that made it to 2020 without updating a bunch of their policies:
- Inconsistent tech and administrative support, as in the example above
- Rotten user interfaces
- API support that doesn't work well enough
- Linux support for their IB Gateway (yay), but only with an X interface (boo)
A user interface example ... Here's Tastyworks showing /ES options for the next several expirations:
Obvious, right? It makes sense to me ...
Here's IB:
First of all, this is the "classic" interface; there's also the "mosaic" interface that the support person I spoke with didn't understand well enough to tell me about. Without Tastyworks to refer to I don't know if I would have figured this out; I know the expirations but I'd never heard of [EW1, E2A, E2C ...] but you have to pick these esoteric symbols from a menu to get the expiration that you want.
Sheesh.
As for the API: hooray that IB has them available, but they work so poorly that there are a ton of third parties who have fixed versions running. Just a few:
Finally, the Linux support: what I want to do is set up a system on Amazon Web Services and/or some other cloud provider or providers to make sure it's up when there's a power or internet outage at my house. But apparently IB just assumed a local workstation (all you could get in 1992) ... with the user interface in X Windows hooked directly to that machine. But X Windows on an Internet cloud provider brings up lots of firewall problems and is generally a pain to deal with.
Fortunately, this guy did a lot of research and figured it out. Kudos to him!
So why deal with IB? There currently isn't anything else available with the range of capabilities they (sort of) support, although Tastyworks is early in their development history and is supposedly working on the same structures that IB has. I can't wait!
Also, Tastyworks is giving away a Tesla to those with accounts as of April 2; get one!
Speaking of Tesla, what a week they had:
This looks like a Short Squeeze to some observers. Some people made millions this week; here's one that cashed out near the top:
Once again, results starting next week ... check back here then!
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