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pyesetzInteractive Brokers is very inexpensive ($1 trades). I rejected them years ago because they didn’t offer retirement accounts and so I suspected them of hyper-rehypothecation (moving the money to the UK while pretending it’s still in Canada). But they do offer retirement accounts now and also a paper-trading system to convince you to give them real money. So I’ve been trying out their paper trades. Not impressed.
(Click to embiggen.) A month ago, during the Canada Day weekend, I had a
buy-order and a sell-order outstanding as usual, for prices about 4% apart.
Both of them triggered with minutes of each other, on a Saturday when the
market was closed. I accepted the free $420 of imaginary money as some sort
of Independence Day gift (IB has offices in Toronto).
This weekend (which is “Civic Holiday” in much of Canada), I had a sell-order for another $10k and a buy-order to cover $100,000 worth of shorts on the US market (I’m a big spender of imaginary money). The buy triggered, even though the market was closed and hadn’t been anywhere near my price. Due to some glitch, no price was recorded for the purchase, so IB’s software is treating the shares as having been bought back for $0 after selling them short for like $180+ each. Now my $100,000 has grown to $200,000 of imaginary money!
This is useless. My “profits” from their bugs are completely drowning out any proof of competance that this paper-trading system could otherwise provide me. Had this been real money, there is no way they would have let me keep the profits from these glitches, so clearly paper-trading is way more profitable than real trading could ever be. This does not fill me with enthusiasm for giving them real money. But without any money, I don’t really have any excuse to complain to them about their free service that they are letting me use for nothing. But it doesn’t trade on the right days and it doesn’t trade at the right prices and now it’s just throwing gobs of money at me. Maybe I should try one of the other services.
