Link with other brokers: Fidelity, TDAmeritrade, other

Roadmap
21

First of all let me say that I despise IB. They have the worst customer support known to man, and their trading platform is ridiculously bad. However, they do have trading algorithms (VWAP) and if you want that, they are the only game in town if using P123. When dealing with lots of low liquidity trades across multiple accounts (I think I have 7: iras, seps, kid accounts, etc) that need rebalanced at least once a week, VWAP will save you a lot of time.
Maybe I don’t get the best fills. I’m not really sure. But everything gets filled at a reasonable price.

I could not find any documentation on any of this on the P123 site and I asked multiple times if it existed. I even offered to write that documentation if someone would explain it all to me.

In a nutshell it works like this:

  1. Setup an IB account
  2. Make a live sim you like that auto rebalances
  3. Create a new account in P123 and choose IB as the broker
  4. Print and submit the paperwork P123 gives you after step 3 for linking
  5. Assign your live sim(s) to the P123 account
  6. Every monday the P123 account presents the buys/sells it thinks you should do
  7. Click the trades you agree with and select the trading algo (I like VWAP)
  8. Press submit
  9. Go make coffee and read the news

If any orders are not fulfilled, which is rare if you start in the morning, those orders are presented to you for resubmission the next day with a click of a button. Easy Peazy Japanesy

There are probably a dozen other little nuanced steps that I have forgotten.
There are also few quirky things that, those of us that use it, have begged and pleaded for P123 to fix but they seem uninterested at the moment.

In general it works well. So well, I am amazed everyone does not use it.

In IB, you can supposedly make a family management account that hooks to all your other accounts for a one login management interface. But I hardly need to login to IB at all so I have not bothered with it. Schwab does this with a Power of Attourney doc and they put all your accounts together in one portfolio, which I love.

If someone had told me all this in August 2020, I would be significantly richer today.

Tony

22

Thanks Tony, I should have clarified: I have a couple IBKR accounts in my name that are linked to P123 and that have capital allocated to live books, strategies, and designer models already.

What I’m wondering is how I could manage this for an account in my spouse’s name at IBKR. I see two options.

  1. File the p123 linkage form to link the spousal account to your p123 account.
  2. Create a master friends and family account structure, containing say your IRA and your spouse’s IRA, etc. Then file the p123 linkage form to link the master account to your p123 account. You could then, in theory, have a single strategy followed by the master account, with IBKR allocating trades proportionally to the sub-accounts.

Are both approaches feasible? Has anyone actually done either?

23

I do option #1 separately for myself, my wife, and my two adult kids.
It makes no difference who’s name the IB account is under.
I could link your account to my P123 sim if I had your IB account number and your drivers license.
The setup is the same.

I don’t know if option #2 would work. I suspect it will not.
That would be great topic for the “Brokerage Linking” documentation that might exist one day.
If you get #2 to work, let me know how well it works.

Tony