How to Access Your Reports Using FTP on Windows
This tutorial assumes you received reports via email or via FTP that were encrypted with the public key you sent to IBKR. If you need guidance to set up the encrypted statement delivery, please refer to this article, which is a prerequisite to the instructions below.
There are multiple methods to access the IBKR FTP server. FTP clients such as Filezilla can be used or you could as well launch the command ftp ftp2.interactivebrokers.com from the Command Prompt or use the Windows Explorer. In this article, we explain how to realize the connection to the IBKR FTP server using Windows Explorer.
Important Note: You will not be able to connect using your browser.
Once you are connected to the IBKR FTP Server, you will have both read and write access to your folder. The retention policy for the files is 100 days - IBKR will automatically purge files after that.
To access your reports using Windows File Explorer:
1. Open the Windows File Explorer by either pressing Windows Key + E on the keyboard. Alternatively, you can type File Explorer into the Windows search box and click on Open
2. In the File Explorer window, type the FTP address, ftp://ftp2.interactivebrokers.com, into the file path at the top of the window and hit Enter.
.png)
3. A window prompting your for credentials will appear. Enter the FTP username and password IBKR provided you with into the correspondent fields and click Log On.
.png)
4. You now have direct access to your FTP folder. Documents and files contained in your FTP folder can now be decrypted using your PGP key, as described in IBKB4108.
.png)
Common issues and solutions
Ensure the correct login details are being used to connect to the FTP server. The username and password you are entering should match the ones you have received from the Reporting Integration Team.
-
Enable the Passive (PASV) mode for FTP connections. press Windows Key + S, type Internet Options and open the panel. Move to the Advanced tab and activate the option Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility). The passive mode is more firewall-friendly then the active one, since all the connections are initiated from the Client side. If you are using a specific FTP Client, check its connection settings or advanced settings in order to find and enable the Passive (PASV) mode switch.
-
In case you have an antivirus or a security software installed on your machine, make sure it is not blocking the FTP connection attempt. Normally, security software allows to set up exceptions for specific connections in order to whitelist them.
-
Should the above steps be unable to resolve the issue, ask your network administrator/s to confirm that your firewall allows traffic from/to ftp2.interactivebrokers.com. Note: Your network administrator should consider that every time your FTP Client attempts connecting to our FTP server with Passive mode, it establishes two connections: a command channel (outbound, from random TCP port above 1024 to TCP port 21) and a data channel (outbound, from a random TCP port above 1024 to the TCP port above 1024 which was negotiated through the command channel). Both connections are initiated by the Client side. In the picture below, you can find an example of this connections schema. Please notice that the ports 2000, 3000, 4000 are examples of randomly selected ports and may very well not correspond to the ones used within your specific FTP connection attempt.
KB3968 - Generate a key pair using GPG for Windows
KB4205 - Generate a key pair using GPG Suite on macOS
KB4108 - Decrypt your Reports using GPG for Windows
KB4210 - Decrypting Reports using your PGP Key pair on macOS
KB4407 - Generate RSA Key Pair on Windows
KB4409 - How to set up sFTP for using Certificate Authentication on Windows
KB4410 - How to set up sFTP for using Certificate Authentication on macOS
KB4411 - How to backup your public/private Key pair
KB4323 - How to transfer your public/private key pair from one computer to another