IB is introducing a new tool called their Market Scanner in the next release. I've made 2 inquiries about it: The first was: "Can the scan codes be programmed by the user to perform a special scan ?" Answer came back a terse "No". Second was: "Well, will YOU program a special scan for me then ?". Answer came back AGAIN, a terse "No". Now, I know these answers are both "off the wall"...as anyone with some common sense about these kind of tools knows that a scanner without some flexibility is pretty worthless. Is there anyone at management level at IB looking over the shoulders of some of their tech support people ? I think not !
You did a good job in making yourself look like an idiot. Tech support answered your question and you didn't like the answer so you come post here. That has nothing to do with the quality of tech support.
Market scanner has been on the market from quite some time. Currently you can use custom filter to narrow down your scan results. We anticipate ability to supply custom scan parameters in future.
I was gonna say, I use it every day to filter for "Top % Gainers" with filter price > $1, < $100 and volume > 50,000. Works great. Customizing scan parameters would be neat-o.
The answers to the questions were direct--but it may not be what we were looking for. Some brokerage companies (e.g., TradeKing, Scottrade, etc.) like to give false hopes with a lot of soft marketing--but fail to deliver their promises on time.
My favorite "classic" IB tech support response was just this week. I noticed that electronic wheat continues to post a bid and ask after the market has closed (whereas all other e-markets show blank bids & asks after close). The response from IB: "Do not place orders in closed markets." --- A few weeks ago, I reported that depth of market fed bad data through the API on paper accounts. The "classic" IB response: "Depth of market works fine on normal accounts. Please close this ticket."
...somebody noticed it... I don't know where this problem suddenly came from, but TWS will generate huge (gigabytes) amounts of logfile data, it has to do with unknown market depth entries.