This has been a constant complaint/suggestion over the years. It is frustrating, because it seems so obvious and so easily fixed.
Don't get me started on their "pacing" of GAT orders. For me, this makes the GAT functionality useless...my orders were literally expiring (hitting my GTD time) before the system ever got to them (i would find the irony there funny if it hadn't been so costly). It was certainly frustrating to discover...but if IB can't handle GATs without delays, I can probably come up with a workaround. The killer though is that I can't find this anywhere in the documentation...lost profits were my after-the-fact documentation. If there are going to be little quirks were functionality doesn't work exactly as described THEN JUST DOCUMENT IT...can't understand why that is so difficult. Another favorite new change of mine is the mulitple minute delay in cancelling OPG orders that don't fill. It's 9:31, the market is moving fast and you need to know your remaining potential risk, if you can take signals from other models in a given ticker, etc...your competitors are getting this feedback in milliseconds, but you'll have sit tight for just a few more MINUTES to get a complete picture...talk about stone ages, i could walk my orders down to the floor faster...hard to fathom how this could reach production.
Completely correct. With the premise that IB is anyway the most serious broker around, here some criticisms: They focus on useless issues while neglecting crucial ones. There is too little investment and insufficient, archaic, development on the API side. - For API, make a <b>unique native .NET DLL</b> and stop the DLL hell. - Remove the damn <b>TWS logoff</b> please, or make it <b>optional</b>! (how many times this has to be said??) - Add a <b>PNL view</b> to the Gateway. Are we supposed to trade blindly ? This is not serious. We are in 2011. As said we are not in the stone age. Remove all the dumb "wizards". Make it essential. Focus on the important things. And listen to the people who friendly tell you that for your own good. Don't be presumptuous. Tom
IB is difficult to beat in terms of coverage of international markets and commissisons are pretty competitive. However, in terms of support for fully automated traders there are a few brokers that do much better. By "native" you mean pure .NET, right? Because IB has provided C++ API that compiles into "native" code for some time. Most people think of a "native" DLL as "not .NET". I don't think this is happening any time soon. First, IB officially DO NOT support unattended autotrading. This just generates too many support requests of the type: "While I was away from the computer, it opened a position in my account and I am loosing money. Where did this buy order come from?" If you are in front of the computer, changing the TWS restart time every time a shut-down warning pops up is very little hassle. Also TWS becomes slower as it runs. So, it needs to be shut down from time to time to prevent complete freeze. Of course, if you have no charts/market depth/times and sales open, slowdown is much slower (pun intended). You do know that you can have a second TWS logon linked to the same trading account, don't you? Then you can run the Gateway for your autotrading app and TWS (possibly on a different computer) to track P&L, open orders etc. Barring that, the API allows requesting account balance etc. So, the autotrading application perhaps should display that. It is certainly the feature that would be most welcome. However, IB resists it because one satisfied request will lead to many others. First, total account P&L, then P&L by instrument, then open orders, then trade history... In no time we have the Gateway as bloated as TWS.
I would guess this is due to the fact IB uses snapshot data instead of tick data. But this also makes IBs data almost never lag in fast markets, which in my mind is a good decision.
I dont's see what other purpose the Gateway could be if not for unattended trading. Robots are present and future and they brings tons of commissions. The argument that the program would <b>"freeze" or "becomes slower" </b>after a while is unacceptable to me, and should made ashamed any programmer working there. I am running robots monitoring hundreds of instrument complete with charting and so on they can be up **forever** (and even several instances for machine), and they have problem making a logoff OPTIONAL? Just add the radio button. "opened a position in my account?" This is unacceptable. I said OPTIONAL: let me take my responsibility of taking it on. I will shut it down when I feel so. So what i understand is that the programming of the "charting" part is so poor that they <b>need to close the program every few hours because otherwise it would blow up</b>. Hey, have you have heard the word "resampling" ? I tell you this is inacceptable. A good programmer, indian or not, with some little brain, would take less than an afternoon to devise an efficient scheme of data resampling to maintain the price history with very little data. If you at IB have problems, I will provide you for free with the procedures to do this efficiently, but please make that damn autologoff <b>OPTIONAL</b>! Also the Gateway is just fine but <b>the PNL view is needed</b>. You could even have some legal issue for that. The excuse of it becoming like TSW is ridiculous. I am just asking to add a small screen and that's it. <b>NO other things are necessary</b>. And please <b>do not add unnecessary things</b>. Tws is cluttered with at least some hundred unncessary features and you have problem adding <b>just that 1 screen</b>, for which you already have the code ? I call that lazyness, and if it were my company several heads would be cut off. Also, wrap up all the API stuff into a <b> **UNIQUE ** native .NET usable with c#, vb.net, j#, c++ </b> (supporting 64 bit systems, etc.) etc. I wonder what those guys do all day long. It would take me less than 2 days to making these changes. I still stand on the opinion that IB is the most serious broker around, that's why i feel i can demand they act accordingly. Tom
Yes, they bundle ticks every 250ms. Which is not an issue for myself. And it should not be an issue for manual or auto trading, unless hft. I doubt that anyone serious in hft would use IB. I only have 1 IB main window open, and have not experienced any slowdowns, I never trade over 5 hours strait though.
i wouldn't call them a clowns,but...somewhere on ET in one post i draw some similarities between them and politicians in DC..what they both do-they create an "appearance' of work by making a lot of cosmetic changes(the easy ones,moving this and that to different places,adding more simple,useless shit) while avoiding the changes that are really needed..it may look productive in their reports(hey! i change appearance of 25 old buttons!),but it isn't in reality