IB is a genuine brokerage and is not a bucket shop as so many FX brokers are. I have found their executions to be instant and their platform is very good although it needs time in which to get used to it. They are not brilliant when it comes to news trading and you can easily get large slippage if you are trying to enter the market with either stop or market orders. They have an excellent API facility that is well supported for software applications from other members and it is also free. I have previously developed applications to use the API using visual basic. I have no doubt that an application could be developed to take news released data and automatically send a buy or sell trade via the API in milliseconds but I have not looked too far into this as yet. Overall I think IB are good and do not manipulate trades against their customers but they could do with better customer service. I hope this has been of use to others and I wish you all the best in your FX trading.

Terrible customer service. Lots of condescension and sarcasm, and NO SERVICE.

I have had an IB account for several years, trading options lightly. I decided to get into fx trading and started using their simulated trading account before committing real money to the market. If the simulated trading works like their real trading, it's terrible. I did several trades, and closed them out, but the program still shows some odd residual amounts in the account - like $1.80 margin used, and small amounts of currencies that cannot be entered through the platform. To handle that, I tried to reset the account to $10,000 several times to restart (specific to simulated trading, of course) and had results ranging from no effect, to having $193,000 in the account. Talking with customer service and tech service had no effect. They had no answers - just that they would "look into it". I would call customer service and get routed to tech services, who would route me back to customer service and be told that tech service would take care of it. When I complained, their attitude was that it was no problem, since it was only a paper trading account. They didn't understand that it undermined confidence in their system. The interface is just too clunky and complicated to work with. They have good spreads on all pairs, and in my experience, fast execution. The fixed 50:1 margin is too limited. For stock and option trading they are very good, with cheap commissions and good executions. I was satisfied with that part of their service. For forex, they have a ways to go before I will trade live with them.

Overall, I found the platform, customer service and execution (fills) were quite good from this broker, however, a couple of points to consider, especially for newbies. Commissions are unlikely to make scalping highly profitable (or for example, when trading with Rob Grespi's Kingforex signal service) and secondly, this broker does not provide the opportunity to trade micro or mini lots to beginners, so I would see this as a disadvantage too.

traded forex with them for months. while their platform is among the best and spreads are among the tightest, their rollover policy is a complete joke. go to their website and see how they calculate daily rollovers and interest accruals. I can trade $million lots and the rollover rates wouldnt be as good as fxcm, oanda's basic rollover for customers. Using IDEALPRO, i was being charged interest on a long 500k aud/jpy position n short 300k chf/jpy position! ridiculous!