What's really great about IB is when you are in a position that is going against you in a hurry and you are trying to get out but your order keeps on getting price capped. And by the time you reach someone to lift the price cap, your position has gone against you in a big way. I love being with a broker who does not allow you to control your own risk. Whoever implemented this price capping algorithm has no clue how a fast market works.
I thought you can have the price cap lifted beforehand and it stays lifted forever. You can only have price cap lifted on the spot?? And it doesn't stay lifted? That is ominous.
It is possible your interpretation is correct. I don't know what symbols I'm going to be trading on any given day, so I can't call in beforehand. My assumption was that there is a reset everyday on the price capping algorithm. So even if you called in about a symbol, you'd have to do that the next day if you experienced more price capping. That is a total guess on my part.
This is ridiculous that you have to call in to lift price caps for every single symbol every day??? Can't you just call in and request price caps to be lifted for all symbols forever and never to have any price caps at all from now on??!! Did you ask IB?
No, I don't think that is the way it works. Again, I could be wrong and I have never verified this with IB. However, after losing several thousand on a single trade that went bad (that I couldn't get out of because of price capping), I asked them to refund my money and to exempt me from any future price capping in general. And both requests were denied even though the price capping algorithm itself was the only reason I lost several thousands instead of several hundreds of dollars. I literally could not control my risk at all during a window of time and by the time the idiotic price capping algorithm had reacted in a sensible way, it was too late and the damage was done. Even with the absolute sh*tastic decisions made by the IB price capping algorithm, IB is still the best broker for my particular trading style. I just live with the occasional bullsh*t it throws my way even though in a perfect world it would be completely eliminated from the face of this earth. There is literally no way any trader worth his salt had any say in how the price capping algorithm works. The things it does are incomprehensible at times. I have complained about it to IB for many years and apparently they are satisfied with the way it can screw people over without any recourse.
I really don't know how they can make people lose money when how they touted the price cap policy as a way to protect investors from what they call "unreasonable prices" that is too far away from the market. But then again given it's IB, it's not the first time that they use mechanisms that supposedly "protect" its clients to actually screw its clients just to earn that extra 10, 14, 29 cents/dollars on each share. And if you add up all of those extra cents/dollars that IB fleeced from you, it's really not that much of a discount broker and it's really not that much cheaper than other brokers either. But it doesn't care because you will still trade with IB until you just can't stand its fleecing anymore and that's going to be a very very long time and it knows that. That's why it doesn't care and just keeps on fleecing. As to what can be done with the OP's problem: The workaround that I use is instead of putting in a stop order to get into a market, I use an MIT (Market If Touched) order or a conditional market order to get into the market at the price that I want. What it does is that as soon as the price that you specify in an MIT order or in the condition for a conditional order, the system will send a market order according to the price that you set to the exchange(s). Since stop-loss orders are market orders in essence so you are really achieving the same thing but without subjecting to a possible price cap. I have used market orders quite a few times and I have never been subject to any price caps. I dunno if I was just lucky or market orders are just not subject to price caps. I believe IB is obligated to send the order to the market no matter what, hence the term "market order" so you will be guaranteed a fill at a price that you specify. If the exchange has its own price cap policy then it's the exchange's problem.
The problem with sending market order is that you are guaranteed execution but not the price. You can get awful slippage. So can’t trade low floats and high spread stocks that way.
same thing with a stop-loss order which is what OP was trying to do. Stop-loss order is essentially a market order. But I guess what I wrote was a bit misleading. I didn't mean that you specifically will get the fill at that particular price that you specify but rather that you will be guaranteed a fill when the price that you specify, the market price or the stop price is triggered.
Well I was told the reason I was getting them was because of the simulator environment so there is that but I feel the same what you do especially since I never once got that message while using TD Ameritrade and using limit orders in the exact same fashion. I have to say if I do get that message in Live, while trying to move my Stop Order closer to the Market Price for a tight in stop and it costs me money, I don't think I will stay with IB.