IB Communiqué - March 30, 2007

We are pleased to announce that effective April 2, 2007, Interactive Brokers will be one of the first brokers to release modernized rules for the calculation of securities margin requirements. Under the new SEC approved Portfolio Margin rules and our real-time margin technology, Interactive Brokers customers in certain cases will be able to increase their leverage. For decades brokers were required to apply fixed Reg T rules-based margin requirements. With Portfolio Margin, margin is based on the largest potential loss found by valuing the portfolio over a range of underlying prices and implied volatilities.

In order to apply for a Portfolio Margin upgrade you must have at least USD 100,000 in Net Liquidation Value in your account. You may upgrade your account to Portfolio Margin through Account Management/Trading Permissions at any time and Portfolio Margin will take effect once your upgrade has been approved. For more information and details on Portfolio Margin accounts, see our Portfolio Margin Highlights.

Hong Kong Stocks and Warrants are now available for trading. Commissions are 0.088% of the trade value with an HKD 18 minimum. See the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for details on the products offered.

Our SmartRouter now complies with all the requirements under the new Reg NMS rules. In order to ensure that you always get best execution for your stock orders we have added BATs, the Boston Equity Exchange, the CBOE Stock Exchange, the Chicago Stock Exchange, Direct Edge, the National Stock Exchange, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange as potential routing destinations. Click here for more details on our SmartRouter.

We have recently launched our IBAlgo family of algorithmic trading solutions. Trading algorithms are an electronic replacement for floor-based block traders, and help traders quantify their trade-offs in getting a large block order executed electronically. The first two IBAlgo solutions are Arrival Price and Percent of Volume. Over the coming months we will make additional IBAlgos available. Those institutions that require specific trading algorithms or that wish to have IBAlgos enabled for their account should contact their IB Sales representative. For more information on IBAlgos, see our IBAlgo highlights.

We are pleased to announce the winner of our 2^nd Annual IB Collegiate Trading Olympiad, Brian Eckerly of Ohio State University who won $100,000. Students were given $100,000 in paper equity, and the students with the greatest positive income at the end of the competition were awarded a total of $400,000 in cash prizes. All students were required to build a program trading application with our API. For details on the winners, click here.

During the last few months we have made the following enhancements to the Trader Workstation:

• Enhancements to Volatility orders, including the ability to: apply the Display Size (Iceberg) attribute, include Volatility orders in a basket, and set a default of On or Off for the Continuous Update feature of Volatility orders.
• BookTrader Advanced Mode gives keyboard control and shows more information.
• BookTrader price histograms now available for ALL products, not just stocks.
• New Shortable column with shortable status colors:
  Red = not available
  Dark Green = we'll try to locate the shares
  Bright Green = at least 1,000 shares are available.
• Consolidated Status column combines status with cancel/transmit functionality to save space on your trading window.
• Ability to change the EFP Interest Calculation on the Order Ticket.
• Adjust Average Cost for any position, not just cash positions.
• Ability for Advisors to allocate to all accounts from the Re-balance window.
• New Order Confirmation pop-up box that shows your order price, commission and margin impact when you submit an order.
• Dividend editor allows you to manually modify dividend schedules or cut-and-paste from other applications.
• Easier access and more information on your trading screens, including:
  • Progress indicator on SpreadTrader;
  • Ability to BOLD underlyings that have options associated with them;
  • Right-click access to configuration settings;
  • Ability to display the full name of a company in the trading window;
  • Close icon appears at the top of the tabs and trading pages.

During the last few months we have added the following third-party solutions:

• TradeBullet
• APS Automatic Pattern Search
• FX-Strategy Pro Charts

For details on these and all TWS plug-in third-party solutions, see our Commercial Tools page. We would also like to remind customers that we make a full suite of third-party solutions available through our Freelance Tools, Programming Consultants, and Third-party Educator pages. To assist our customers, for each entry on these pages we let IB customers vote on their experiences with these providers.