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IB Communique: August 18, 2006
IB has been hard at work ensuring that we continue to lead the industry in technological innovation. During the last few months we have added the following enhancements.
Interest expense and interest income offsets can be the largest component of your trading costs. An Exchange for Physical (EFP) trade allows the swap of a long or short stock position for a Single Stock Future (SSF). SSFs have an interest rate built into their price that is determined competitively by numerous market participants, rather than a single broker. EFPs can save you financing costs on your long positions, and increase the income earned on your short positions. IB makes it easy to compare interest saved and interest earned by displaying the EFP spread on an annualized basis net of dividends. For a detailed explanation of EFPs, click here.
We have been working to enhance your statements and have released daily "beta test" statements to Account Management/Report Management/Beta Statements with the following new features:
- Mark-to-market profit and loss across all asset classes
- Easy expansion and contraction of sections
- Links for easy access to additional details
- A new profit & loss performance section
- Opening and closing balances along with balance change details
- Addition of FX translation gain/loss due to currency fluctuations
- Sleeker look
Over the next few months we will be working to enhance the following additional items:
- First in, first out realized and unrealized losses
- Simplified reporting of advisor/broker client transactions
- Year-to-date reporting as well as customized date ranges
- Position reporting of forex transactions
- Yearly and monthly statements that match our new daily statements
- Enhanced tax reporting
Please note that "beta test" statements are now only available for individuals and institutions, but will be available for advisors and brokers in the next few weeks.
Our new "beta test" statements will run in parallel with our existing statements for a number of months, and we encourage you to send any feedback on the new statements during the test period to statements@interactivebrokers.com.
One of the advantages of being an IB customer is that we listen to our professional customers as we continue our never ending quest to lead the industry with the most advanced trading technology. In order to systematize your requests we are adding a new permanent feature poll that allows you to suggest new TWS enhancements and to have other customers vote on the enhancements. We will do our best to prioritize those requests with the most number of votes. To nominate requests and to vote, visit our new TWS Voters Poll page, to learn how to sign up for a Voter ID and password in order to add your voice to our programming queue.
N225 Futures commissions have been lowered to JPY 150 per contract, JGB to JPY 750, and all other Japanese futures to JPY 500. Visit our Futures Product Page for more information on these products.
The CBOT recently introduced electronic agriculture futures contracts, and these products are now available for trading at IB. Trade oats, soybeans, wheat, corn, rough rice, and ethanol futures contracts for USD 3.05 per contract, bundled or unbundled, as specified on our site.
- Chart enhancements including arithmetic and autofit, lets you combine and chart multiple contracts
- New stop trigger methods, including single last, double last, bid/ask, double bid/ask, last or bid/ask, and midpoint
- Specify an order type for the stock leg of a delta neutral order
- A new dividend column
- New soft edge margining colors which highlight when you are getting close to your trading limits
- Advisor allocations from the BookTrader
- Ability to add an execution price column to your order line
- Industry standard color coding for the SpreadTrader
- New hot-keys for auto stops, auto trailing stops, and contract specific buys or sells
- The ability to import contract descriptions from a txt file
- Color coding for in-the-money and out-of-the-money options
- Functionality to create multiple combination orders at the same time
- Single Stock Futures delta neutral orders
- Chart Fibonacci Trendlines, Accumulation/Distribution Lines, Chaikin Money Flow, and Money Flow Index indicators
For more details on these and all upgrades, see our TWS release notes.
The IB PaperTrader simulated trading environment has been enhanced to include European and Asian products as well as allowing for a new reset balance of USD 1 million. To open an IB Paper Trading account, visit Account Management/Trading Access/Paper Trading.
Our WebTrader, IB's HTML order management interface, has been completely revamped to allow easier monitoring of market data and execution of orders. We encourage those customers with firewall issues or that require a simpler trading interface to test drive our new WebTrader from our login menu at the top right corner of our website.
During the last few months, IB has added the following third-party Commercial Tools add-in partners:
- Inspired Trading Systems, Inc.
- Vbs Solutions Inc.
- Spooz, Inc.
- QMatix
- ATrade Investment Technologies, LLC
- FundCount
- Modulus Financial Engineering, Inc.
- Ward Systems Group Inc
- Beiley Software
- QuoteIN
For more details on these products and all our partner Commercial Tools add-in products, visit our Commercial Tools Page.
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