Interactive Brokers Review 2024 (2024)

• Who Should Choose Interactive Brokers?
• Interactive Brokers Commissions and Fees
• Interactive Brokers Platform and Technology
• Interactive Brokers Range of Offerings
• Interactive Brokers Research and Education
• Interactive Brokers Customer Service and Security
• About Interactive Brokers

Interactive Brokers is a superior choice for professional investors, day traders and really anyone who is serious about trading. Their flagship IB Trader workstation is one of the most comprehensive platforms out there for researching, tracking and making investments.

Interactive Brokers’ commissions and fees are highly competitive, including the lowest margin trading rates in our survey of the online broker space. They offer a comprehensive menu of investment types, covering almost every major asset class as well as providing access to international markets across 33 countries. Serious investors will find nearly everything they need and should be pleased with the experience.

For beginner and occasional traders, Interactive Brokers also offers attractive benefits. IBKR Lite is designed to be a more approachable platform for those just starting out and offers commission-free trades on U.S.-based stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds. The simplified Interactive Brokers mobile and web platforms are also easier to navigate than the desktop IB Trader Workstation, though they have fewer features. Interactive Brokers’ AI tool can also help answer questions and make trades.

That said, beginners could find Interactive Brokers a little overwhelming to use, especially if they venture onto the IB Trader Workstation. There are so many features and research tools, it can be tough to even know where to begin. They do offer a demo and plenty of instructional videos to help, but someone looking to get trading with as little effort as possible may find the process simpler on competing platforms.

Interactive Brokers has built a reputation for rock-bottom commissions and fees, which we confirmed in our study. They offer two main programs: IBKR Pro and IBKR Lite. Since IBKR Lite is geared more towards more individual, recreational investors, it offers unlimited commission-free trading for U.S. stocks and ETFs as well as certain mutual funds.

Meanwhile, because it targets professional and institutional investors, IBKR Pro charges commissions, offering both fixed and tiered pricing options. Under the fixed pricing system, you owe $0.005 per share for stock trades, with a minimum fee of $1 and maximum of 1% of the total trade value. Those making a large volume of trades per month could switch to the firm’s tiered pricing system, where the fee decreases as your total trading volume gets larger. Interactive Brokers similarly uses both fixed and tiered commission systems for other investments like options, bonds, forex and mutual funds.

Interactive Brokers charges the lowest margin rates of the online brokers we surveyed. For IBKR Lite, they charge a flat 2.6% to finance margin trades of all sizes. It’s even better for IBKR Pro users, where margin rates range from 0.75% to 1.6%, depending on the amount borrowed, with larger transactions garnering a lower rate.

Their other account fees are also minimal, such as a very low $10 fee for outgoing wires. There also may be inactivity fees for low-balance accounts that remain dormant for too long. They do not charge many of the other common fees like for security reorganization or mutual fund redemption that you may see at other brokers.

Interactive Brokers is not paid for order flow on their IBKR Pro accounts, but they could receive payment for order flow for IBKR Lite users. Payment for order flow is when a broker sells trade trends to market movers, so they can potentially take advantage of that knowledge before your trades go through. This means IBKR Pro users know their trades will get processed competitively while IBKR Lite users paying no commissions may be at a disadvantage.

Interactive Brokers Stock Trading Commissions

Fixed

Tiered

As we’ve noted above, Interactive Brokers offers several different platform options. The flagship is the desktop IB Trader Workstation, which gives you access to securities trading, order management, charts and watch lists in one location. It also includes a wide range of investment tools, like the Options Strategy Lab, Volatility Lab, Market Scanners and Portfolio Builder, which can help you test out your investment ideas, research different markets and construct a diversified portfolio.

The platform gives you real-time access to market news and research from publications like Reuters, Dow Jones and Morningstar. It also allows you to view and create customizable charts that include an impressive range of indicators and tools to assist your research. Lastly, the column customization tool lets you track hundreds of data points about investments, such as market price, after-hours percentage change and month-to-month change. After you figure out which data points you want to follow, you can build them into a constantly updating custom spreadsheet.

IB Trader Workstation offers a ton of information and tools that are excellent for institutional and highly experienced investors but that may come with a bit of a learning curve. While they offer a demo account if you’d like to test it, beginner and recreational investors still may find all of the information overwhelming.

Fortunately, Interactive Brokers offers a couple of other alternatives. They have a simplified portal directly through their website, with no download necessary. This interface makes it easier to make trades, track your portfolio and see key metrics, like your net liquidation value. While it doesn’t offer quite as many research tools, it still allows you to track market news and access some charts for technical analysis, though with fewer data points than on the desktop version.

Finally, there’s IBKR Mobile, which works on both Android and iOS devices. It includes most of the features from the web service but far less than what’s available on the desktop version. Through the mobile app, you can still trade all available asset classes while accessing similar research resources as the other platforms.

For additional trading support, Interactive Brokers offers an AI tool called IBot that can answer questions or execute certain tasks. It also uses a predictive algorithm to suggest natural next steps, like asking if you want to make a trade after your initial question.

Interactive Brokers was the clear winner in our study in terms of range of offerings. They offered nearly every type of investment we were looking for as part of our research. They also offer fractional share trading, where you can buy less than a full share of stock depending on your budget. One place where they stood out in particular was the wide range of international investment opportunities as Interactive Brokers gives access to markets in 33 countries.

The only service they didn’t offer was advisory services to help plan your portfolio. They also do not currently offer cryptocurrencies but plan to by the end of the summer. Still, these are both minor downsides and the range of offerings is a strong point for Interactive Brokers.

Interactive Brokers’ offerings include:

Interactive Brokers offers extensive educational resources to help people start investing. First, they have a Traders Academy with dozens of courses for traders of all skill levels. The courses run from introductions to getting started on the platform and the basics of trading charts to more advanced classes on how to use options as well as the advanced research tools on the Interactive Brokers platform.

The online classes are free and include videos as well as quizzes and notes to help people study. They also have a Student Trading Lab to help instructors teach computer science and finance to their students.

For market research, Interactive Brokers provides a range of materials including webinars on current market topics, market commentary and insights from over 70 professional investors, including the chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, and a blog geared towards quant investors focused on topics like blockchain and AI.

These research and educational resources offer a nice extra balance to the trading tools and market news provided by the actual Interactive Brokers platform itself.

Interactive Brokers offers customer service by phone, email and chat. Their phone and chat customer service is available all day and night on business days; chat is also available between 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET on Sundays. They say they reply to emails within 24 hours in normal business hours. We tested each type of customer service by asking a range of questions, like checking their interest rate for margin trading and whether they offered a daily newsletter.

Their phone customer service was disappointing. We made eight calls and on five of those attempts we hung up after being stuck on hold for over 10 mins. The few times we did get through, we were able to reach someone and get our questions answered. However, it felt like we were speaking with a call center in India.

While the Interactive Brokers phone customer service was not ideal, they did a great job with email and the chat room. We sent six emails and received answers to five of them. Several were answered immediately by a bot while the ones handled by human customer service reps were answered within a few hours. Chat support was even better as we received answers within minutes each time, from bots and from humans.

For account security, Interactive Brokers is solid and offers everything you’d expect: firewalls, 128-bit encryption, two-factor authentication and mobile security features. They do not offer voice recognition technology for customer service, a feature that is starting to show up with other brokers.

Interactive Brokers provides the standard $500,000 of SIPC insurance for your account balance as well as an additional $30 million of coverage for your investment assets and $900,000 for cash provided by Lloyd’s of London.

Launched by Thomas Peterffy in 1977 when he bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange as an individual market maker, Interactive Brokers is one of the largest electronic brokers in the world, executing millions of trades per day. With headquarters in Greenwich, Conn., Interactive Brokers also has offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Today, they have over 2,100 employees and are a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq.

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