JWG

Interactive Brokers: There's Still Money in Financials

"Tom Peterffy ... is relentless in the pursuit of excellence for his company."

I use IBKR as my online broker. I'm a software engineer with a lot of experience in writing apps like their trading platform, TWS.

It's just not a quality job. It is buggy, quirky, defies normal conventions for UI design, and doesn't agree with its documentation. Many of these defects are quite typical of a bunch of enthusiastic coders with no professional IT management to establish proper processes for Q/A, priorites, standards, and so on.

Checking their careers page it became clear that their software staff are mostly russians (i.e. cheap) and living all over the place. Again, it doesn't look like a professional IT organization.

Overall I think their software is only just useable. It may be, of course, that they don't care, because TWS is not central to their business model. Perhaps they mainly expect people to use third-party add-ons like Ninja Trader. Or perhaps, as other posters suggest, executing trades for the commission revenue is not where they make their money. So if you are an investor, you might argue that the quality of TWS does not matter. Nevertheless, it sure doesn't look like relentless pursuit of excellence to me.

So I'd like to ask Charlie Bottle why he wrote that.

Thanks