Interactive Brokers: Online Broker US Review: 2024

Interactive Brokers, found in 1978 is currently one of the biggest discount brokers in the world. Naturally, the broker is regulated by different financial authorities according to the country, including UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and India’s Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). It has presence over a number of countries worldwide!

A one-stop solution for Indian residents interested in investing both in the Indian as well as the global markets.

Interactive Brokers: An Overview

Interactive Brokers has business on over 135 market destinations worldwide, where they provide service of trading stocks, options, futures, forex, fixed income and funds worldwide, executing about 1,746,000 trades per day.

Interactive Brokers has its headquarters in Greenwich, Connecticut. It functions with over 1400 employees in a number of countries like the USA, Switzerland, Canada, India, Hong Kong, UK, Australia, Hungary, Russia, Japan, China and Estonia.

In India, the firm is based out of Mumbai. They entered the Indian market in the year 2009, and needless to say IB is one of the best brokers around. In India, they offer trading segments for stocks, bonds and derivatives only. It has a membership in both Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange, but allows you to trade NSE only.

Interactive Brokers: Pricing

Interactive brokers doesn’t charge an account opening fee. But it does charge maintenance and inactivity fee. If you are tarding NSE only. basically you have to pay minimum Rs.200 either in brokerage or as maintenance fee. A minimum of USD 500 i.e. Rs.35000 approximately is required to subscribe to market data and research subscriptions with this discount broker. Also, you need USD 100 i.e. Rs.7000 to maintain the market data as well as research subscriptions. This varies if you trade both NSE and overseas.

However, because this is a global brand, they offer an option to trade in multiple countries with cheapest possible rates, keep in mind that brokers also have to pay exchanges with international trades. Also, currently, RBI only allows $250,000 remittance per individual per year, which is still a decent amount for trading internationally, however margin trading is not allowed.

It charges $0.005 per share in US markets, whereas in India the brokerage is capped at Rs.20 only.

Interactive Brokers: Trading Platforms

Because IB is such a huge global company, it has so many tools that listing them is impossible. There are very efficient in terms of performance, speed, user experience and analysis and offer a ton of research reports along with basic tools like moving averages in their graphs and charts.

They offer the following applications to facilitate trading :

1. IB Web Trader: This for users who prefer trading through web portal, accessible through browser.

2. IB Trader Work Station: A pretty standard workstation IB provides a ton of tools for analysis and ever provides research reports and fundamental analysis. It has a SmartRouting facility to get you the best price for your order.

3. IB TWS Mobile: Offered both for iOS and Android, the mobile application is pretty efficient and offers all the facilities a laptop TWS does.

As mentioned, it's not easy to list all the tools IB provides just because of the sheer quantities of them. But here are few tools that make IB unique and can help you get best experience trading using IB.

Interactive Brokers: Unique Trading Tools

1. Chart-Based Trading:

This is one of the best features for fundamental and visual traders. Chart based trading provides a one stop screen where you can do your analysis for the stock, as well as place orders by fixing your buy and sell price. It is as simple as dragging a a buy line and a sell line on the screen to the amount at which you want to buy and sell and the bot does it for you when it hits the price, sending you a notification.

2. Real Time Scanners:

This can used to sort and filter information in real-time. Along with that, you can easily find the top gainers and losers any day, and use it to check stocks at their 52-week high and lows. You can also filter according to trends, prices, etc. This can particularly useful to day traders, because you have single screen of all kinds of information.

3. Watch list:

Interactive Brokers focuses on simplicity. They provide a watch-list feature where you can have all the similar industry stocks all at one place with their trends, along with charts for selected stocks. This can be very beneficial to have a broader view of a stock, a market and industry. You can also sort the stocks according weaker and stronger performance, giving an analytical advantage.

4. Advanced Alerts:

This is one of the best features on the platform, as well one of the best features around. You can set an alert, even on the chart, when a stock hits a particular price. It provides you with a pop up, which is customizable in terms of sound, also providing you an option to write notes so that you can easily remember why you set the alert in the first place.

5. Hot Buttons:

This is a completely customizable feature for frequent trading of popular stocks. You can place an order of a particular amount with just a click of pre-assigned button. It is also customizable in terms of giving you an option for a button to cancel orders, change routing, adding a bracket order, and a ton of other such features. This can make trading more efficient and also, it’s a cool feature!

While Interactive Brokers does have a lot of features, you may not always require all this to make profitable trades. However, it does make this stock broker more attractive among its peers, user discretion advised.