On Nov 4th In late pm Asian hours (already early hours of Nov 4th EST), I put in a Day Limit order to buy a certain USD corporate bond through TWS system. I also ticked on True for Outside Regular Trading Hours. Additionally, I put in an alert for the same instrument at around 2 points above my bid level. Late at night in Asian hours I got the email alert stating that this bond is trading below my bid level at a larger size than my bid. The next day I see nothing filled. How does the TWS order algo work for bonds? How do I get an investigation done into why nothing got filled? @def do you have any suggestions?
Plenty of factors at play here: (Corporate) bonds trade OTC, not on a centralised marketplace. A trade agreed between 2 parties can be reported with a delay. I expect (little experience trading corp bonds at IB) that IB's "algo" will look for bids posted on different venues - before sending an executable order to that venue. If no executable bids are posted your order will be held at IB's servers, or it maybe posted on IB's internal market place. Re investigation - given the OTC nature of bond markets I don't think you will have any luck with that...
We buy corporate bonds in a retail account at Schwab. We've never had any problems. But that part of our account is long term investment. We are not trying to trade bonds. As the previous post noted, most corporate bonds are traded OTC. The bond market is antiquated. It's amazing you can even place an order online. It wasn't that long ago that you had to call a broker at the "bond desk." They would look at some sort of online system to see what was available, but even for them it wasn't updated in real-time. So to place the order, they would have to call some other bond desk to see if they still had the bonds. Kinda like Craigslist, hmmm? Is that lamp still for sale?
If you provide full details to the ticket system, I could ask our bond desk to take a look but liquidity during Asian hours can be quite poor on the corporates and I suspect that was a factor. That of course is just a guess but feel free to do a ticket and PM me with the ticket # or PM me with details. thx