We are changing the blog up a bit for the next few weeks. Here at Tackle Trading, we are blessed to have so many fine folks in our community and everyone has a different trading style and a different set of challenges on their road to successful trading. With this in mind, we are going to give some love to our members that have challenges when it comes to using certain brokerages. There are as many brokers as there are types of trades but they are not all created equal. Some brokers have platforms that are easy to maneuver through and some have platforms that are very rudimentary. Sometimes choosing a brokerage has nothing to do with software at all, although this is a common item that new traders go in for. Sometimes the only thing traders want is cheaper commissions and this is totally understandable as we have to overcome the costs of trading if we want to be successful. There are other reasons that one may choose one broker over another. Sometimes only certain brokers will do certain types of accounts. Whatever the reasons are for choosing a broker is immaterial and varied for everyone.

I am not going through all the different brokers in this blog as everyone has their favorites and it would take a very long time to get through them all. Instead, we are going to try and solve an issue for a group of Tackle Traders that don’t necessarily have a choice for a particular broker and are forced to use one particular broker because of the many issues I spoke about.

The broker that is going to get our attention for the foreseeable future is Interactive Brokers. The reason this is a hot topic for this blog is we have a large number of community members that can only use this broker because of the lack of competition in certain areas of the world. In the US, the list of brokers is a mile long and those brokers are forced to provide a good product and a good service level because of the amount of choice provided to our friends from the states. However, folks outside of the US are not afforded such luxuries because of the lack of viable competition and I also believe due in part to the amount of the trading population. This is not an endorsement for Interactive Brokers, it is just a solution to a problem that many Tackle Traders face. IB is a low-cost brokerage that works for many traders outside of the US, namely Canada, Thailand, South Africa, etc. The platform for IB is not the best I have seen or used but the lower commissions can sometimes offset the pain of learning a new platform.

It is this struggle to use the IB platform that causes a lot of issues for the folks that use this service. I have had to teach many community members how to use the platform and I have fielded more questions about the software than I care to remember. I will say there are other issues with IB that we will talk about in the weeks to come but for now, we are just going to introduce the platform and get folks warmed up for the task at hand. I have had some questions posed to me from some of our members and I aim to cover all that as we move forward.

This week I am just going to show the platform and how to do a basic stock trade. In the weeks ahead I will go deeper and hopefully uncover the mysteries of the IB platform. So if you are struggling to use the IB platform, check out the video and see if it can help you out.

Happy Trading!

Coach Holmes