At my place of work, some light personal use is tolerated and the system installation are regulary redeployed, i.e. resetting. I still don‘t want to be the one catching a virus on the work PC.
Banking, online trading and financial services are explicitly forbidden by internal regulations though.
(We are dealing with money)
But are you actually allowed to trade at all? 
I have bought 3 different US domiciled ETFs (including VT) on IB this January. No issues. I’m a retail customer with a cash account and passed the required knowledge tests when I opened my account the second half of last year (September I think). Therefore I still have a modest account there.
Unless they have explicit man-in-the-middle policies (with your computer trusting different certificates from the ones issued for the websites you are visiting) they won’t see anything as long as you use SSL. Then again maybe they have such policies but you don’t know it.
In any case it’s usually better to trade, and even work, on machines you can actually trust to a certain extent, because they will definitely see the 2FA code as well as everything else.
Man in the middle is done quite frequently on SSL traffic in companies.
You have to check if the displayed certificate in your browser is really from IB and not from your company.
Frankly, I don’t know. This was my first attempt at trading anything.
Since I did not get any warning or error message before receiving the popup with “unknown error”, which was at the very end of the process, I don’t have any clue about what I can and what I cannot do.
And I am not too keen in trying to buy something else just to check if I can trade with my account or not 
I bet the support is clueless and the issue is actually market permissions or similar. Can you trade other US stocks? Can you check which products you have access to?
(There’s been a few people who mentioned opening an account since the beginning of the year, so it seems like a one off, not a new policy, since you mention you didn’t mention a lot of knowledge when filing out the forms that could also be the issue)
How can I check if I can trade other US stocks without actually finalizing the buy operation?
I’ve changed my “experience” and now, as far as I can see, I have the permission to trade in the US and in Switzerland
I have tried to buy by indicating the quantity of shares I want or the amount of money I would like to put, by choosing Market price or Limit price.
All the times it ends with a popup “unkown error” 
Maybe you can try the mobile app on your own smartphone?
Put an order with a price much lower thank market price. If it’s served it will be a good deal anyway…
Some questions:
@romzzz: It’s called SSL Interception and is done at most bigger companies. It’s to filter out malicious content, but theoretically can be used for other stuff too. That’s why I don’t recommend doing personal stuff on your employer’s computer. 
Call it what you want, I call that man-in-the-middle and consider it bad practice.
They could capture the password by local keylogging.
I don’t even want to know which company would do such a thing 
Fly, you fools!
Just FYI, your term is not wrong, but can cause confusion when talking to IT guys.
SSL Interception/ SSL Inspection is a technique to intercept the HTTPS traffic. So the traffic is being decrypted, analyzed, and then encrypted again. As already mentioned, that usually happens with a crop certificate.
We speak of a men-in-the-middle attack, when a bad guy is using the same technique to have a look at your traffic.
Good news from the IB side: eventually… last night I made it! 
But don’t ask me how! 
I did not change anything in my profile (so I’m still a Retailer)
I simply bought small quantities of shares, as many times as it was needed to get to a total number of shares that corresponds to what I wanted to buy at the beginning.
And it worked!
I still have no idea of why I could not buy all at once, but at least I have found a way of getting what I wanted 
Thank you all for your support! It meant a great deal to me and it motivated me to keep on looking for a solution 
From what I can see in this post
Chris was given exactly the same bogus answer that I got: “to trade US ETFs it is necessary to upgrade the status to Professional”.
This is not true, not even after Brexit.
So if you receive the same answer from IB support people, don’t fall into the trap and look for another way of solving the issue without upgrading your profile to “professional” trader 
Hi guys,
I just opened an IB account following MP’s tutorial, but I guess the website has had a little overhaul since the UI and the options were not exactly the same.
Now on the one side, it says that I have a pro account:
And on the other side, it says that I am treated as a retail client:
Any idea why?
Also: IB did not ask me for any proof of residence in Switzerland, did I miss something?
Thanks!
That is only related to the pricing plan. In the US, they also offer IBKR lite.
Alrighty, thanks.
As for the proof of residence, I’ll just wait for them to ask for it.
