Good luck zzzap. Hopefully you get your money back. From your story and your log, I can definitely see the possibility of some weird bug on IB's end. Keep pestering people up the food chain til something happens. Dropping lines such as "will contact the SEC" in correspondence is a good way to get noticed. It is my personal experience that IB will make you whole if it is warranted.
Usually you get one of the IB guys latch on and respond pretty fast. Mum's the word for now at least.
I will defend IB against stupid claims to the extreme (and would chastise one of the earlier dickheads and even the last poster a little ... IB normally don't respond all that fast to threads unless the answer is simple). In this case I am very sympathetic with zzzap and find the idea of TWS spitting out old orders on restart extremely worrying. IB, if this is a real prospect it suggests that we can NEVER leave TWS unattended for fear that it could generate an order at random that would lose (or win) large amounts of money. I think the OP should approach IB senior management (PM Sal as well). I would also like an assurance from IB that should TWS do this we will all be treated well.
In the link to Yahoo posted be gangof4 this guys name came up. I'm sure he would be interested in this problem. Interactive Brokers Mr. Milan Galik - Sr. VP of Software Devel.
Since you believe this may be a software issue, have you tried to recreate this scenario using a papertrading account? send the basket order and purposely go over margin, wait for the rejected order, unplug the internet until tws shows disconnected then reconnect, see what happens. Maybe you can duplicate it. In the past, I have had problems with TWS that did not seem common with other customers. (I asked around of various forums). I believe that with all these updates, overwriting files in the jts folder all the time things can get messed up. One day I completely uninstalled tws and deleted the jts folder. I then reinstalled the very same version of TWS and found several issues resolved. So I am saying that as silly as it sounds, it could be a glitch just on your system, if so maybe you can duplicate the problem on your system even if others can't. If so, that would obviously be huge for your case.
The idea is sound, but when he would finally succeed in reproducing this, obviously very rare error, the only thing he would have to prove it happened and to inspect for debugging is the same log he already has. Besides, there is a sound chance that the papertrade account will not show up this problem ever, timing and handling are different; eg. the origanl order was rejected because of margin, this would hardly happen in the paper account. Ursa..
1. he could have a witness. 2. He could record a camtasia video etc. He can set the papertrading account balance = the balance of his real account, then try to duplicate the exact order and the order should reject just like a normal account. correct me if I am wrong. Maybe it's worth a try. Clym
1. Lets assume that he's telling the truth. 2. Another poster has seem similar (but low impact) events. Has anyone else experienced such events (I havent but I'm usually trading when TWS is online and I have very few brownouts).
About 5 years ago I was trading pairs. LLTC short and XLNX long. Market was moving sharply down. My short position gets executed (with profit) and I am left with long only position. By the time it took me to realize what just happened I am down over $700. I close my long and call customer service. After investigation I was told that order has been send from my computer. It is quite possible that order has been sent from my computer but I had nothing to do with it because I was standing behind the chair and watching screen (drinking coffee) when it happened. By the way I am still with IB and never had any other problem since.