Opinions on Interactive Brokers

[airrun76]

I was hoping some users of IB and MT can give their opinion of Interactive Brokers in general and using IB account with Medved.

1. Can someone share the true cost of trading stocks with IB? For example, I a buy 200 shares of AAPL, what is total cost including fees, price per share, etc? It's hard to figure this out on the website.

2. Can you do OCO type orders from MT charts using IB account? My TDA account is restricting me from doing this since I enabled the Advanced Features on my account. Very frustrating. 

3. Any big negatives using IB? (hidden costs, bad support, etc..)

4. I'm assuming IB fully integrates with MT?

5. How many days backfill for intraday and historical do you get using IB?

TDA is costing a lot for low volume trading. I'm hoping IB will be much cheaper in the long run for my costs in trading. 

Thank you for any feedback.

[Jerry Medved]

1) I believe the IB fees for that order would be $2. there are some extra fees but they are insignificant.

2) Yes, OCO bracket is supported by MT with IB. We will enable others in the future

3) Option chains are obnoxiously slow.  And Level II sucks because they don't let us get the same data via API as you can see in TWS.  Initial max # of symbols is 100 unless you pay more.   They charge for data, though basically just pass through exchange fees.

4) "fully" is a relative term. IB has huge feature base. We don't support every feature they have though we do support everything that MT supports. As we add support for stuff like multi-leg orders, we will make sure we implement it with IB as well as others.

5) Intraday backfill is 10 days. Don't remember about historical...