If IB is making you pay professional fees then any provider will as well. Those fees are from the exchanges. IQFeed does the same. If I recall correctly Robert Morse mentioned something about NYSE auditing clients over professional status.
Agreed. The table shows three ticks at 1ms, 2ms, and 3ms. I'm demonstrating how a price quote is computed in one 250ms period. Let me clarify that in the table. Yeah I remember them talking about that. Only if the price in the previous period was unchanged. This surprises me, are you sure? What's the point of only using the volume of the last processed tick? That makes no sense at all.
How would they know via the auditing clients (tax status, online message posts, linkedin profile) that you're a professional ? I've seen some retail traders make the mistake of thinking that self-employed and trading their own account = professional wrbtrader
You have to declare if you're an amateur or professional when you set up any brokerage account, and may have to confirm it yearly. A key consideration is if you are trading with other peoples' money. That's a big one; I think that you might need to be licensed to do this.
The cumulative volume comes separately from the ticks. So you can still calculate the total volume, but you cannot match the volume to ticks. It's f*d up. They have a new way to get tick by tick data, but there are stricter limits on number of subscriptions. I got to give credit to IB for having very fine grained offerings ... you can pay for only what you need.
Just to be clear ... I'm talking about getting data via API. TWS itself may be getting data differently so manual traders may not see the difference.
I called them. They transferred me around; and... nobody knows. They told me to file a support ticket, so that they can route it to the right person. So, at this point, let's assume sorcery and magic.