IB Communiqué - June 23, 2005
We are pleased to announce the launch of our re-designed suite of mathematical risk assessment tools, Interactive Analytics (IA). These tools are provided to all IB customers for free as part of the Trader Workstation platform, while third-party providers charge a substantial fee for similar items.
IA is composed of three modules: Portfolio Analytics which lets you assess the risk of your entire portfolio across asset classes and look at the risk of “What-if” scenarios; Option Modeler that automatically calculates model option prices based on live market data including the implied volatility smile; and Option Analytics which lets you focus on the risk and valuation of specific option contracts.
With our next release of IA, we will add Value at Risk (VAR) measures.
For more information on IA, see our IA Interactive Tour, IA Highlights, IA Quickstart Guide, and the TWS Users’ Guide.
In addition, on Thursday July 14, we will be holding an IA webinar to answer your questions. Registration is on our IB Webinars page, and we request that you view the IA Interactive Tour before attending the webinar.
To give you maximum flexibility in your order routing you may now configure IB SmartRouting to:
- Exclude exchanges.
- Exclude non-electronic or non-firm quotes from the US execution venues where both electronic and manual execution is possible, while capping the maximum amount of trade-through from the NBBO.
- Automatically re-route orders you submit outside regular trading hours to the major exchanges 3 minutes before the open.
See the TWS Users' Guide for more information.
We have upgraded the Trader Workstation with the following major enhancements:
- In addition to stocks and options, you may now add futures components to your inter-market spread orders.
- A sleek new look for our Interactive ChartsSM, including reduced processing time, forex charts, and new technical indicators.
- The ability to upload option exercise instruction files.
- Making market center regular trading hours the default for time-in-force orders.
- Pegged-to-stock orders for BOX and PHLX.
- Market scanner for bonds.
- Push-pins to let you keep a window on top.
- Overfill protection for OCA orders by specifying 3 different methods of handling OCA instructions.
- Portfolio page now updates as positions change.
- Update of open order limit prices to bid, ask, midpoint, last or closing price with the click of a mouse.
- Native Eurex spread orders including delta neutral orders.
- Improvement amount cap for Box Pegged-to-stock orders.
- Market scanner advancing/declining issues and up volume/down volume for all stock venues.
- Automatic rollover for futures contracts 8 days before expiration.
- The order ticket now remains open and you can now use the Order Ticket to enter an order manually, or have the fields automatically populated with data selected on the trading screen.
For details on these and other TWS enhancements, see our release notes.
In addition we have upgraded the API to include:
- A Visual Basic test client
- The ability to only view a fixed number of level II market data lines.
- Support for new order types including BOX price improvement orders.
- Backfill market data which is now available for 1 day and will be expanded to cover a larger period of time in the near future.
See our latest API release notes for more information.
IB has recently introduced the following new products and adjusted its commission schedule to reflect exchange fee reductions:
- We have added the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) which offers the world's top electronic crude oil futures contract.
- CME QQQ, IWM, and SPY futures on ETFs are now available for trading.
- Nymex will be moving their trading platform from CME Globex to Nymex Clearport as of July 19th, 2005.
- CBOT Gold and silver contracts (big and mini) are now USD 1.61 bundled.
- New CME forex options are now USD 2.11 bundled.
- Euronext France options EUR 0.30, CAC40 options EUR 0.50 bundled.
- Eurex Germany stock options EUR 1.50 bundled.
- Option cancellation fees have been reduced on BOX and PHLX to USD 0.10 and USD 0.60 respectively, which is reduced or eliminated based on the number of executed orders.
For more information, see our Exchanges, Futures Commissions and Cancellation Fee pages.
We have redesigned our Account Management system to include sidebar navigation to make it quicker and easier to perform your account management functions. We have also added new Inquiry/Trouble Ticket and Chat functionality to Account Management, so you can get fast help to your issues. We encourage our customers to read our Tips for Best Service to understand how to get the quickest resolution to your problems.
Lastly, a reminder that for the quickest status on your deposits, withdrawals and transfers, visit the Funds Status page under Account Management, which displays the latest information on all your funding transactions.
We have made significant enhancements to our interest rate model for credit and debit balances. Starting at the end of this month, we will report interest charges and interest earned on a daily basis in the Account Activity Statements. This will provide traders with a more accurate model of the funds available for trading in a more timely fashion. Full details of the calculation method will be posted to the IB website when the new system is released.
In addition, we have started to provide an addendum to our monthly statements which shows futures P&L on a first in, first out (FIFO) basis. See the link at the bottom of your statement for this addendum.