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Interactive Brokers, the automated global electronic broker listed on Nasdaq as IBKR, has introduced a new feature called Connections to help investors uncover trading ideas and evaluate investment opportunities.
The tool highlights links between products, strategies, and themes across the global market. Built into the IBKR platform, Connections enables users to view related stocks, ETFs, options, futures, bonds, economic indicators, and trading strategies from a single location.
Because Interactive Brokers provides access to more than 160 markets worldwide, Connections can surface a wide range of related instruments. By combining cross-asset insights across stocks, options, futures, bonds, Forecast Contracts, and thematic groupings, the tool helps users discover relationships that might otherwise go unnoticed.
"Clients of Interactive Brokers can access stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds, funds, and more across 160 global markets from a single integrated platform. That breadth is the result of decades of work expanding our product offering and geographic reach, and it’s what makes Connections possible. By bringing all of this together, Connections helps our clients uncover opportunities that other platforms simply cannot match."
— Milan Galik, Chief Executive Officer, Interactive Brokers
The Connections feature includes data on peer companies, sectoral themes, and Forecast Contracts tied to macroeconomic indicators such as housing starts and interest rates. It also integrates ETFs, options, and other tradable instruments to give investors a flexible toolkit for discovering opportunities, managing risk, or building strategies around a specific stock or theme.
Practical examples of use cases include:
🔹 A user analysing a large technology company may uncover lesser-known competitors in cloud storage and then explore the Cloud Computing theme to view other connected companies.
🔹 An investor with a long position in a major homebuilder could look at Forecast Contracts linked to new home sales, or review options strategies to manage exposure to housing data.
🔹 For emerging areas such as Carbon Capture, users can identify companies connected to the theme via ETFs, revenue streams, or macroeconomic drivers.
With the Connections tool, investors can:
🔹 Analyse all connected instruments and strategies in one view
🔹 Explore related companies, thematic trends, Forecast Contracts, and ETFs alongside futures, options, and bonds
🔹 Compare performance across market themes and sectors
🔹 Identify opportunities to hedge, diversify, or expand exposure using a broader market context
The new feature is part of a wider suite of discovery tools at Interactive Brokers, which also includes global valuation comparisons, sentiment analysis, bond screening, and securities lending insights.
