I answered this question once on Reddit (comes up every now and then):
Personally, I do feel safe enough to place all my stocks with IBKR SG.
IBKR is after all a well established broker (~50years of business) and the largest by trading volume. IBKR is also quite tight on risk management, generally being one of the stricter ones in terms of margin requirements (this year I've received notifcations about 3 times regarding margin tightening).
Looking at past bankruptcies, the one that always comes to mind is MFG, which was a case of fraud. Moreover, MFG was a primarily derivatives broker rather than a traditional stock broker.
For larger organizations like Lehman, they didn't even activate their SIPC, since everything was separated (as they should be).
But of course, if it helps you feel better by diversifying across brokers, then why not right? It doesn't cost much more since there are so many low-cost brokers around these days. That said, if I had to guess who would shut down first between IBKR, Tiger and Moomoo, I think IBKR wouldn't be even come to mind.
And I think one more thing to note also is that, Singapore stock brokers aren't covered by insurance either (only deposits as far as I know). Do you feel unsafe placing your money there? (assuming custodian brokers of course).
Then perhaps another thing you might want to know, if you use a CDP account, is that CDP is managed by SGX, which has a market cap of 11b (SGD). IBKR's market cap is 27b (USD). Of course, SGX probably won't collapse or run away with our money, but I thought this was an interesting angle to look at this hahah.
I answered this question once on Reddit (comes up every now and then):
Personally, I do feel safe enough to place all my stocks with IBKR SG.
IBKR is after all a well established broker (~50years of business) and the largest by trading volume. IBKR is also quite tight on risk management, generally being one of the stricter ones in terms of margin requirements (this year I've received notifcations about 3 times regarding margin tightening).
Looking at past bankruptcies, the one that always comes to mind is MFG, which was a case of fraud. Moreover, MFG was a primarily derivatives broker rather than a traditional stock broker.
For larger organizations like Lehman, they didn't even activate their SIPC, since everything was separated (as they should be).
But of course, if it helps you feel better by diversifying across brokers, then why not right? It doesn't cost much more since there are so many low-cost brokers around these days. That said, if I had to guess who would shut down first between IBKR, Tiger and Moomoo, I think IBKR wouldn't be even come to mind.
And I think one more thing to note also is that, Singapore stock brokers aren't covered by insurance either (only deposits as far as I know). Do you feel unsafe placing your money there? (assuming custodian brokers of course).
Then perhaps another thing you might want to know, if you use a CDP account, is that CDP is managed by SGX, which has a market cap of 11b (SGD). IBKR's market cap is 27b (USD). Of course, SGX probably won't collapse or run away with our money, but I thought this was an interesting angle to look at this hahah.