Gerald Perez

Q. Interactive brokers are the 16th largest US securities firm, with a leading presence online, and yet we have hardly heard from you in the Middle East. Is this about to change? And how are you going about it?

A. Our organisation has set out to become the lowest cost producer for Universal Direct Access in the industry. We have done so by using economies of scale and scope. We plan on doing more marketing in the Middle East.

Today we do have a good amount of buy and sell side clients in the Middle East which has been growing steadily and luckily our clients are spreading the news in the Gulf States about our offering.

Q. What exactly are the services you offer?

A. We provide Electronic Universal Direct Access to over 50 exchanges in 14 different countries through our professional trading platform called Trader Workstation, and all through our single Universal Account. That means our clients can trade options, shares, futures, forex, bonds, ETF's, SSF's and warrants from our Trader Workstation.

Q. How competitive is your pricing?

A. For US options we ask $1.00 or less per contract; For US shares we ask $0.01 per share for the first 500 shares and $0.005 per share for any order above 500 shares. For UK shares we ask a flat rate of £6.00 for an order of less than £50,000 in trade value; For Forex our spreads are up to three pips wide and we ask 0.00002% of trade value.

Then we have ECBOT E-mini DOW futures at $2.13 per contract, NYMEX futures at $2.95 per contract and IPE futures at $3.20 per contract. All of the aforementioned fees include brokerage, exchange, clearing, technology and regulatory fees. Recently Barron's publication in the US concluded us to be the number one Ranked Software Broker with the lowest trade cost in 2005.

Q. How do your services differ from other offerings in the online brokerage market?

A. We provide Universal Access to over 50 exchanges, all from a one platform and account, with Smart Order Routing - IB Smart Routing searches for the best firm price available at the time of your order, and seeks to immediately execute your order electronically.

The Professional front-end Trader Workstation supports over 30 order types, charting, portfolio and options analytics, spread trading, alerts, risk monitoring tools, and an open API.

We are so confident that our value exceeds our competitors that we ask prospects not to buy before they compare us to our competitors. That is if they can find a better electronic trading technology for lower prices we suggest they take it.

Q. How secure are transactions on your system?

A. We offer a SSL layer of security to our front-end.

Q. Would a client still own shares on your system if you as the broker went out of business?

A. We confirm all of our client's accounts are segregated and we provide account protection of up to $30 million. The latter is a better layer of account protection than the norm in the industry.

Moreover, our clients like the fact that they are dealing with a very large capitalized reputable online broker, $1.9 billion right now, that has been in business for over 29 years.

Q. What potential do you see for your company in the Middle East?

A. We believe we have a lot of potential in the Middle East as a lot of brokers still ask extremely high premiums to trade international products.

In addition, I find the Middle East client well educated in trading electronically and eager to trade internationally. Now it's our job to get them to consider us to trade global markets at reasonable prices.