calling ameritrade a good (or discount for that matter) broker is laughable. they cost me >$50k years ago by blocking a trade, presumably because they had an opposing position in the stock.
one should stay away from the trading babies company as well.
IB is really the only ethical brokerage company out there.
If they are selling and you are buying (or vice versa), why would they block you? Isn’t any seller looking for a buyer and every buyer looking for a seller?
Most likely, they thought the trade was fraudulent or the market got to volatile.
Interactive Brokers blocked trading in many over the counter (OTC) stocks recently, if they aren’t paying to post their financials to otcmarkets.com or are otherwise flagged as more risky by that site. Disappointing, but probably doesn’t effect too many people.
Update on several more recent annoyances either in effect or in the pipeline.
Effective March 4th, 2020, Vanguard will no longer accept purchases for
securities in the following Over-The-Counter market tiers as designated by
the OTC Markets Group (otcmarkets.com). The market tiers include Pink
Limited information®, Pink No-Information®, Grey Market, Expert Market or
securities designated with the status of Caveat Emptor (buyer beware).If you already own a security which is included in one of the Over the
Counter market tiers listed above, you can continue to hold this security
or sell the security in your Vanguard account, however, additional
purchases will not be accepted to add to your existing position.
Interactive Broker’s compliance department seems to have gone overboard worrying about how every one of their customers might be an actual company insider with tons of restricted stock they’re looking to dump (there are rules about how and how much insiders can sell, both in terms of the process to be allowed and as a % of the market volume). As a consequence, any time you trade a modest fraction of a stock’s trading volume, which happens all the time for OTC or low liquidity stocks if they only have a few trades per day and you happen to be one of them, now they send you a nasty alert and ban any trades in that stock, including closing your position, until you respond and affirm “gee I’m still not an insider for buying $2k of that otc stock”. Then after a few days processing time, you get a 2 week reprieve and can trade it again, but any similar action will trigger it again. I’ve already had this for half a dozen stocks and it’s very irritating.
I hear Fidelity is going to ban trading in certain “gray market” OTC stocks as well as certain more complex preferred stocks (which you previously could only trade by phone), but I haven’t been able to confirm these yet.
Many of the hot stocks in the past few days ala GME, AMC, NOK, BB, BBBY, KOSS, etc are being banned from trading or close only at various brokers. Robinhood won’t allow new positions in any of these, IB banned GME today (yesterday they banned options, but stock could still trade), hearing Etrade banned a couple…
Not a fan of the destruction of the free market… (Despite small exposure to these broker/associated funds collusion affected / manipulated stocks). Alternate broker suggestions to move my half mil out of ibkr to after this fiasco?
Any reputable brokers left?
I don’t use margin anymore so ibkr isn’t even really cost competitive anymore, I had just trusted them.
Schwab was having issues this morning as well – definitely going to consider moving if there is a platform that is verified as not having screwed people today.
Poor maintenance of adequate infrastructure to support all of their “customers” in websites/apps seems like a separate issue (maybe driven by the “no-fees”/“hidden commissions” environment). There’s been more customer volume, apps crashing seems like an understandable (though not excusable) failing.
Or did they also shift to only allow sales to artificially manipulate demand and prices down in targeted securities? I don’t see how locking out only buy orders (and not sell orders) can be determined to be anything other than direct manipulation of the supply and demand, which is illegal. These brokers should all be shutdown by SEC and liquidated.
They have broad leeway to restrict trading temporarily, but only restricting one side of the trade looks like it is clearly manipulation.
They certainly seemed to be having issues with the meme tickers, specifically, this morning. (saying that they were invalid security names and not allowing you to issue buy or sell orders)
That said – I wasn’t trying to do anything with “normal” stocks this morning, and was just checking/adjusting limit orders.
Schwab has often had these performance issues, I’ve heard of Fidelity also but don’t have them. TDA and ET have rarely but sometimes had issues, with TDA a bit more often and more seriously while ET was usually just slower/laggy. IB has had issues one day in the last decade.
That’s from performance rather than policy issues. All of them have been making policies worse, and I was disappointed in IB for their close only rules on these stocks yesterday and today.
Yeah, it could just have been performance problems – will wait until the dust settles to see who played fair during all of this.
eTrade won’t let me sell cash-secured puts on AMC. That’s some BS.
They just banned AMC GME midday.
What’s their reasoning? I get restricting margin use and all, but I’m not selling a naked call or anything. I’ve got the cash in the account and know what I’m doing.
They have a material interest in and are protecting the shorts and manipulating the price down.
IBKR chairman claimed on Bloomberg interview “short squeezes are illegal”, and no customers will leave. He deemed the companies not worth their current prices, so no one else is allowed to value them more.
Bloomberg “reporters” giddy after close: “the stock was down today!” “$10B in market cap wiped out” “Details, details…” “We can all sleep easier tonight!”
Robinhood banning opening positions in a dozen or so popular stocks.
Due to ongoing market volatility, the following securities are currently set to position-closing only:
AAL
AMC
BB
BBBY
CTRM
EXPR
GME
KOSS
NAKD
NOK
SNDL
TR
TRVG
wow so much for being anti-establishment. I guess they have their own IPO to worry about.
So which one of these tickers can I put on play money list? long or short 