Dedicated to Best Price Execution

IB's SmartRouting Advantage Delivering Best Price Execution IBKR Clients

IB SmartRoutingSM searches for the best firm stock, option, and combination prices available at the time of your order, and seeks to immediately execute your order electronically.
US Equities Execution Price Improvement Comparison*
Net US Dollars
(per 100 shares)
Interactive Brokers $0.62
Industry $0.15
IB Advantage $0.47

*Net US Dollar Price Improvement vs. Industry Bid / Offer1. Based on independent measurements, the IHS Markit, a third-party provider of transaction analysis, has determined that Interactive Brokers' US stock price executions were significantly better than the industry's during the first half of 2020.2

View IHS Market Letter

Notes:

  2. IHS Markit. Industry as a whole for the referenced periods according to IHS Markit. The IHS Markit analysis for US stocks included all market orders of 100 shares or more, up to 9,999 shares from January - June 2020.

What Other Online Brokers Conveniently Leave Out

Our results are even more impressive when you consider that other industry-touted statistics don't give you the whole picture. They only discuss the percentage of orders that saw price improvement, and conveniently ignore the percentage of their orders that were dis-improved or had no improvement. In contrast, our statistics are netted, showing the true bottom-line price improvement including, all improved, dis-improved and unimproved amounts.

  • Unlike smart routers from other online brokers, IB SmartRouting never routes and forgets about your order. It continuously evaluates fast changing market conditions and dynamically re-routes all or parts of your order seeking to achieve optimal execution and maximize your rebate.
  • IB SmartRouting represents each leg of a spread order independently and submits each leg at the best possible venue.
  • IB SmartRouting AutorecoverySM re-routes your US options order in the case of an exchange malfunction, with IB undertaking the risk of double executions.
  • To help provide price improvement on large volume and block orders and take advantage of hidden institutional order flows that may not be available at exchanges, IB includes eight dark pools in its SmartRouting logic.

Our smart router takes into account transaction costs along with the fee or rebate for taking/adding liquidity when determining where to route your marketable order when the inside market is shared by multiple exchanges. For clients who want even more control of their orders, TWS clients can specify stock and options smart routing strategies for non-marketable orders. For stocks, clients with the Cost Plus pricing structure can elect to have their non-marketable orders routed to:


  • The exchange with the highest rebate.
  • The listing exchange on the symbol.
  • The highest volume exchange that has a rebate for adding liquidity.
  • The highest volume exchange that charges the lowest fee for taking liquidity.

For options, clients can choose to send their non-marketable Smart routed orders to the exchange offering the highest rebate. These routing directives can be set on a per-order basis from the "Misc" tab of the Order Ticket, or as a global default setting from the Smart Routing configuration page.