Residence, Regulation, and Company Management Structure

The company's main office is in the USA, but it also has offices in Switzerland, Canada, Hong Kong, London and Sydney.

IB is regulated by SEC, NASD, SFA and other regulatory agencies around the world.

Neither addresses of offices, nor any managers of the company are mentioned on the site.

Company's Market Position

The company names itself a broker and trades at more than 50 market centers worldwide.

Liquidity suppliers on Forex are not mentioned.

The company offers individual, joint, trust, corporate and partnership accounts for clients, managers, brokers and partners.

The minimum size of account is $5000, minimum order size is $25000.

The company's property assets are more than $2.5 billion, financial statements are presented on the site. IBG is rated as Investment Grade by Standard&Poors. The account insurance is $30 mln. dollars.

Types of Services Offered

Surprisingly, there is no complete list of trading currency pairs and clear information about spreads on the site. There is still exact information about the sizes of minimum and maximum orders, and about margin requirements for each currency. It's not clear what is the level of liquidity of positions.

Transaction comissions and other charges are fully described.

Users have to sign a special agreement if they want to open an account. Opening an account can be done through the site or through interactive forms.

Depositing an account is executed electronicaly, through US automated clearing house transfer, by check and etc.

Traders Support

The site features a «University of IB» section, interactive seminars («webinars»), olympiads, trade shows, forums, interactive tours on different questions and appendixes, user's guide on the trading platform, certificate information and FAQ. Ecuational programs of the third-party firms are also available.

Demo-accounts work with a 15-minute delay from a real-time market.

Interactive support is carried out through e-mail, chat, telephone.

Fundamental information, news and analysis is available through the trading platform. The site carries only advertisment of these services. Judging by these ads the range of analytical support services is rather wide.

The Trading Platform

Trader Workstation offers an opportunity to trade various products including shares, options, futures, bonds, ETF's, forex and single screen. The platform supports over 40 types of orders and enables to get real-time fundamental and technical analytics, including graphic analysis, development of option strategies, calculating risk of options and market-scanner.

Except for Trader Workstation, IBG offers IB WebTrader - an HTML based trading screen. There is also MobileTrader suitable for mobile devices.

Apart from all this, the company offers Customer Activity Monitor, which helps professional advisors and brokers to find and view all client activity.

Site Design and Ease of Navigation Comments

There are 5 versions of the site – English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese. Non-English versions are quite different from the English one concerning both desing and structure, but the general style is retained.

The whole design is heavy enough. The site is oversaturated with information and flash, some pages are pdf-documents.
Obviously, the designers' purpose was to put a maximal amount of information for visitors. That's why the structure of the site is rather difficult and navigation caused several problems.

Advantages

• The company is respectful. Brokers rarely expose the size of property assets and give financial report.
• Investment rating of the company from S&P is an important advantage.
• The set of financial tools for trading with a universal account is impressive.
• Terms and conditions are democratic.
• Trading software is multifunctional and flexible.

Disadvantages

• The site is oversaturated with information about services, but, unfortunately, some important information and descriptions are either skipped or aren't definite enough.