Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (IB) is an online discount brokerage firm in the United States. The company traces its origin to 1977 when Thomas Peterffy bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange as an individual market maker, and formed T.P. & Co. the following year. Today, the company consists of many subsidiaries around the world, operating on most major stock, futures, bonds, forex, and options exchanges worldwide. The company commenced a public offering on 4 May 2007 under the ticker symbol NASDAQ: IBKR on the Nasdaq exchange[1]
Barron's Magazine stated in 2009, that Interactive Brokers maintains a position as the least expensive trading venue for investors,[2] and holds the ranking as the #1 Lowest Cost Broker for the fifth straight year.
Statistics
On its website, IB states that it has consolidated equity capital of over US $4.4 billion, and also states that IB and its affiliates exceed 1,000,000 trades per day and trade 14.1% of the global equity options volume.[3] As of 2004, the firm's clients were making some 500,000 trades per day on various international markets and accounted for 21.4% of the options trading volume of North America. The parent company, Interactive Brokers Group, maintains offices in Chicago, Switzerland, Montreal, Hong Kong, London and Sydney. IB is regulated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the regulatory policies of all other exchanges on which it trades.[4] The company had revenues of $1.6 billion USD and income of $734 million USD in the twelve month period ending in August, 2006.[5] According to the 3rd qtr 2008 report, IB states that they have 107,000 customer accounts and over $9.4 billion in client assets.[6]
In 2007, the company issued 40,000,000 shares or approx. 10% of the capital of Brokers Group LLC in a public offering, at a price of US$30.01 per share. The company's shares trade on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Software
Their Trader Workstation (abbreviated TWS) is a cross-platform Java desktop application, similar to their WebTrader web application, but is extensible through a proprietary API. TWS software will prompt to update itself every few weeks, or a .jar file from a consistent URL can be downloaded to your PC, which then unpacks to the current version. A variant intended for personal digital assistants and smartphones also exists, called MobileTrader.
PaperTrader is a trading platform utilizing Trader Workstation software in a degraded mode, specifically targeting developers and papertraders. Papertraders can use it to experiment with trading for free in a virtual marketplace, while developers use it to test programs written towards the proprietary Traders Workstation API. Any market data subscriptions available through the master account, are likewise accessible through the paper trading account; a prominent warning dialog appears to remind the user they are signed into the paper trading account, which is artificially populated with 1 million dollars.
References
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