Top Forex pro Acount : Interactive Brokers

Founded in 1977, Interactive Brokers is one of the oldest online brokerages in the U.S. and has been listed publicly (Nasdaq:IBKR) since 2007. It was one of the first to offer a multi-asset solution that now includes options, futures, forex, and bonds across 100 market centers in 24 countries.

Regulated in numerous major financial centers globally, Interactive Brokers is known for its competitive commission rates, and today offers retail forex outside of the U.S. and Alberta, Canada, offering 85 currency pairs, over 4200 CFDs, and thousands of exchange-traded securities.

Interactive Brokers offers a web-based and desktop version of its IB Trader Workstation (TWS) trading platform, which is covered by U.S. patents and includes a plethora of different order types, including algorithms for automated trading. The broker also launched Bitcoin futures, further broadening its offering into digital asset.

Trust Score

Trading with a forex broker traders can trust is crucial to success. Unfortunately, forex fraud and scams are common in the industry.

Here at ForexBrokers.com, we maintain the largest independent regulatory database available on the web. Using 28 different variables, we have created a proprietary 1-100 score (the higher the better) of overall trustworthiness, which we call the Trust Score. Here is our trust summary of Interactive Brokers.

	Interactive Brokers
Trust Score	91
Year Founded	1977
Publicly-Traded Company (Listed)	Yes
Regulated in Major Hub	Yes
Regulated in Emerging Hub	No
Authorised in the European Union	Yes
CFTC Registered (USA)	Yes
FCA Regulated (UK)	Yes
IIROC Authorised (Canada)	Yes
FINMA Authorised (Switzerland)	No
ASIC Authorised (Australia)	No
SFC Authorised (Hong Kong)	Yes
MAS Authorised (Singapore)	No
FSA Authorised (Japan)	Yes
FMA Authorised (New Zealand)	No
CySEC Authorised (Cyprus)	No

Offering of Investments

The following table summarizes the different investment products available to Interactive Brokers clients.

	Interactive Brokers
Minimum Initial Deposit	$10,000
Currency Pairs (Total Forex pairs)	85
CFDs - Total Offered	4217
Exchange Traded Securities: US	Yes
Exchange Traded Securities: International	Yes
Cryptocurrency traded as actual	No
Cryptocurrency traded as CFD	Yes

Commissions & Fees

For forex traders, IB aggregates prices from 14 of the world’s largest dealers and instead of marking up spreads, it charges a commission per trade ranging from $16-$40 per million round turn ($8-$20 per side), comparable to brokers that offer commission-based FX trading on an agency basis.

For active traders, there are applicable discounts you may be entitled to depending on your monthly trading volumes and the relevant products, and while active traders can be rewarded with commission discounts, beginners may find overcoming fees more challenging due to monthly minimum spend requirements.

Despite all these various fees and trading costs, Interactive Brokers appears to score well in this category, but without publishing its average spreads, it is difficult to make a precise comparison. Overall, we would like to see IB publish its average forex spreads in 2018, since it competes well in other asset classes such as equities, where it ranked first out of 16 U.S. equity brokers in our sister site’s StockBrokers.com 2017 Broker Review.

	Interactive Brokers
Average Spread EUR/USD - Standard	N/A
All-in Cost EUR/USD - Active	N/A
Active Trader or Premium/VIP	Yes

Customer Service

For our 2018 Forex Review, 129 customer service phone tests were conducted over three months. The data collected is institutional grade. On average, three questions were asked for each test. To score each test, the tests were divided into three separate groups and scores were given for the time taken to connect with each support representative and the ability of each representative to professionally (and thoroughly) answer each question. A Net Promoter Score was also given for the overall experience.

Results: