Interactive Brokers, also known as IBKR, was founded in 1993. Since then, it has continually provided its customers with competitive rates for trading on more than 135 markets. It has been consistently ranked as one of the best platforms for day trading, mostly because of the state-of-the-art tools it offers to its traders to help them invest in a variety of financial products. 

Ease of Use

The IBKR platform was designed with experienced and active traders in mind. Beginners might have a hard time finding their way around, especially when we take into consideration how many options you have in terms of both tools and financial products offered. 

However, more experienced traders will find IBKR’s platform very well designed and its IBot, the AI-powered digital assistant, exceptionally helpful for navigating the platform. This short selling broker’s trading platforms can be accessed via your browser, mobile, or downloaded to your desktop PC. The mobile version is fairly limited in features when compared to the Trader Workstation. 

The Trader Workstation is a robust platform that’s perfect for active traders and investors managing multiple products. It offers traders flexibility not commonly found with other brokers, such as staging orders for later, creating conditional orders, and even connecting another application to it to place automated trades. 

Stock and Other Investment Options

If you want to have a truly diversified portfolio, Interactive Brokers is the place to start building it as it offers an impressive selection of products. Interactive Brokers offers short selling stocks, options, futures, forex (23 currencies), bonds, and funds. IBKR gives you access to 135 markets across 33 countries. It also supports fixed-income products, including corporate and government bonds from Europe. 

With Interactive Brokers, you can also participate in fractional share trading, trading IPOs, warrants, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash.  

Pricing, Fees, and Payment Methods

Interactive Brokers, too, is very transparent about its fees for shorting a stock, which are explained in detail on the website. The pricing model, however, is relatively complex. You can choose between an IBKR Lite and IBKR Pro plan.

If you choose the Lite version, the pricing will be fixed for most investment options, while with the Pro plan, you’ll be able to choose between fixed and tiered pricing. If you were to opt for the fixed pricing system, the rate per share would be $0.005. The same price applies to penny stocks. Options would cost you $0.65 per contract.

When it comes to payment options, you can fund your account and withdraw your funds via wire transfers, ACH transfers, RFP, checks, online payments, and direct rollovers. You can also use direct deposits and online bill payment options to fund your account. 

Reputation and Customer Support

All 10 of the IBKR offices around the world are properly licensed in accordance with the local regulations. Interactive Brokers LLC is a member of the NYSE, FINRA, and SIPC and is regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Australian, Canadian, Hong Kong, UK, India, Japan, Ireland, Singapore, Central European offices are also registered with the appropriate regulatory bodies. 

IBKR’s customer support is highly rated by users. If you find yourself in need of the help from the team behind this best short selling broker, you can send them an email, call them, or chat with them to get the information you need. You can also report a bug or another problem, request or vote for new features, participate in the community forum, and help other users solve their problems.