You can have an account balance lower than your initial deposit minimum, obviously. But there's a catch: because IB allows you to trade lots of different marginable security classes, they mandate that your total equity + margin collateral >= $2000, or else you will not be able to open any more positions - only close existing ones. I guess this is because FX trading inherently requires margin, and the lowest margin minimum (SEC imposed?) mandates a 2K value of the account to trade on a margin. Pretty retarded, but that's life.
Unrelated to that, they don't let you use your collateral for trading. In other words, liquidations can (and likely will) occur as soon as you are over your margin req even by a $1.
Otherwise, I really like their spreads - often as low as haf-pips. Comissions can really eat into your profit if you're trading very often; their minimum FX comission is $2.50. For stocks and options, I don't think anyone beats IB's comissions, hands down.
Customer support can be sketchy - I've been pissed off a few times by the arrogance, on other occasions help was fairly professional.
A couple of times per day (specifically, 14:00-14:15 and around 21:00 EST for about 10 min) there is no market data through TWS and trading is impossible. The second outage is due to their daily MD reset, I believe, and can be really aggravating.
Their software does have quite a bit of a learning curve to it, but gives you tons of configuration options, as well as advanced order types (bracketing, trailing stops, trailing stop limits, scaling etc). Charting is hideous, though it does give you the ability to place directly from the chart, so you see where your orders/trades are in relation to the market).
Unrelated to that, they don't let you use your collateral for trading. In other words, liquidations can (and likely will) occur as soon as you are over your margin req even by a $1.
Otherwise, I really like their spreads - often as low as haf-pips. Comissions can really eat into your profit if you're trading very often; their minimum FX comission is $2.50. For stocks and options, I don't think anyone beats IB's comissions, hands down.
Customer support can be sketchy - I've been pissed off a few times by the arrogance, on other occasions help was fairly professional.
A couple of times per day (specifically, 14:00-14:15 and around 21:00 EST for about 10 min) there is no market data through TWS and trading is impossible. The second outage is due to their daily MD reset, I believe, and can be really aggravating.
Their software does have quite a bit of a learning curve to it, but gives you tons of configuration options, as well as advanced order types (bracketing, trailing stops, trailing stop limits, scaling etc). Charting is hideous, though it does give you the ability to place directly from the chart, so you see where your orders/trades are in relation to the market).
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Hope this helps some. I also took a look at IB's forum and see there has not really been any activity vis a vis QT for quite some time. I imagine many people might be migrating away from QT in anticipation of likely, eventual cutoff of external broker feeds. 