I run a hedge fund. There are no hedge fund managers I respect who don’t run their personal accounts on IB. The IB platform is in many ways ahead of the full suites provided by leading prime brokers and third parties. I see many hedge funds -especially smaller ones - going with IB as a prime solution.

Your statement here is just empirically false.

I started my career as a trader at a bank and then moved on to quant/trading/PM roles at extremely cost sensitive firms. Not a single one of them used IBKR.

> There are no hedge fund managers I respect who don’t run their personal accounts on IB.

This thread is about institutional customers rather than personal accounts.

I know at least one former hedge fund manager who ran a high 10 figure hedge fund whose personal account is not at IBKR. I respect him a lot.

> I see many hedge funds -especially smaller ones - going with IB as a prime solution.

Are they cost sensitive? The fact that you have hedge fund structure set up does not mean that you are cost sensitive.

IB is actually one of the cheapest, but are also in almost every global exchange and have a lot of let's say "features". Of all the retail investing platforms, I think they are the biggest and the top pick for rather serious investors. It's actually not very user-friendly.

What makes you think they are expensive? Trading US stocks is like $1 per trade and interest rates are benchmark + 1.5%.

> Of all the retail investing platforms, I think they are the biggest and the top pick for rather serious investors.

I would agree with this, but I'm not sure that this is a meaningful universe for comparison.

It's also quite different from the original claim with which I disagreed.

> use a professional broker such as Interactive Brokers, which institutional clients use

I'm sure that there are some institutional customers who use IBKR, but it's probably not many and they're probably not very cost sensitive.

This is also why I added so many qualifiers to my disagreement. You can open an LLC and be an institutional customer in a certain sense, but it doesn't mean that you're cost sensitive and trying to cut your costs to the bare minimum.

Expensive in what way?

I assume you mean "trading on margin". Swaps are custom contracts and not something average people are doing. IB definitely supports trading on margin and has one of the lowest rates around to do so.

IB is definitely the choice for someone who wants to have real market access and tools at their fingertips.

That’s just false. Commissions, rates, etc are rock bottom.

However you will be charged at least $10 per month regardless of transactions, unless you have >$100k with them.

Or were you saying specifically their swaps are expensive?

They also have a terrible user interface and horrible support. Highly un-recommended.

It has or at least had really cheap margin rates.

What the fuck are you talking about dude? They have rock bottom margin rates, like multiple % lower than you get with retail brokers like schwab, etc

Who do you like that's cheaper? IBs margin rates max out around 2% in the US, which seems quite low.

The best tier is about 30bps over fed funds or libor, doesn't matter in the current environment. I've seen better from major banks.

This is on top of the other downsides that I mentioned.

It would be fine if the financing terms were worse, but everything else was better as long as your total costs are lower.