Why Interactive Brokers?
Before using Interactive Brokers — or, affectionately, IBKR — I was considering CMC and eToro.
CMC’s website felt clunky, and I’m someone who gets distracted easily.
eToro I just… never gave a fair shot — no real reason, I just didn’t, and I’m happy to be told I missed something by anyone who might have used both and can say how eToro does it better.
When I landed on IBKR, I started with the phone app — intuitive and fairly straightforward to use once you play around with it a couple of times. Stuck with it ever since. The website is fine — functional, not the best-looking UI around — but the app is more than enough if you’re doing basic stock buying and selling like I am. Can’t speak for power users, though.
A few things I’ve come to like since.
The FX handling. I can buy a US stock in whatever currency I happen to be holding and it converts automatically, at rates that don’t make me wince. If you juggle more than one currency, this quietly removes a whole category of annoyance.
The fees. Relatively low for what I do — compared with other platforms I’ve used, nothing has made me feel fleeced.
The AI angle. IBKR has an API, and you can wire an LLM — Claude, ChatGPT — into it so that after you’ve rinsed your idea through with your LLM buddy, the order is staged and ready in seconds. Going from “let’s think about this” to a set-up order without leaving the conversation is genuinely slick. I was feeling pretty good about myself when I discovered this function.
The catch: the LLM (I use Claude) will be an absolute pain in the arse about not pulling the trigger itself. It’ll happily prepare everything, then refuse to actually place the trade.
If you’ve found a clean workaround, let me hear it.
No more than two years in, and no real complaints…yet — not a power user hammering every corner of the platform, but good enough for basic stock trading. One day, perhaps, one day I might level up to being a power user.
— J-Dub