Bid/ask stop works as follows. Suppose you have a stop at 18.00 and you are long. Then as long as the ask is not < 18 (it might be <= 18, not sure), your stop does not activate. So if the stock is 17.95 x 18.01, your stop is not activated. If it is 17.86 x 17.96, then your stop is activated and you'll lose the 10 cent spread and get filled at 17.86.
Yes, I have something like this, with a dual WAN. Might I also suggest that an emergency (farther away) stop be submitted to IB to be held on their servers and then canceled after the local stop is executed. This has worked well for me for some time.
RTFM is also a good idea before starting a thread with a title like this. Maybe OP you can still change it? Ursa..
IB didn't screw this thread's author. He screwed himself, and then he screwed IB by giving it bad PR it didn't deserve. He used a sophisticated piece of trading software, without bothering to read the directions or even much knowledge of order execution, and then, instead of suspecting that perhaps he himself is to blame for the negative results, he immediately blamed others for his own foolishness.
The above is professional advice. Entering a Stop Loss order... Just says "I cannot trust my judgement to exit a position"... And for that failure... you are willing to pay a PENALTY every time. Personally... In 2007 so far... I have entered about 200,000 orders into IB SMART... And 100% have been Limit GTC orders. Something like 5% Market Orders might be acceptable... If you are trading very liquid securities... And occasionally get into trouble during a fast market. But seriously, people just have no idea... What a can of worms ANY type of Market Order is. Most regulations on the books are easily circumvented... Either by using one of MANY bona fide loopholes... Or just cheating and then claiming an error was made.
Hmmm...Read The French Menu?...Read The Foreign Magazine?.... I sympathize with anybody truly having problems, but cummon - let's stop the "IB Stole My Money" type threads. A simple "Question about execution using TWS", or the like title would be better. IB isn't out to "get" our pitiful accounts. IMHO they do a great job, while keeping costs low. And, like Ursa suggests, read the manual first. There is a bunch of info there. TWS has many many features. Good trading to all.
no need to be so judgemental. You won't get brownie points from IB. His thread subject was a question.
If you think that is a good IB story, here's one of mine. I went long 50 contracts on the qqq's when Sadaam was captured. The market tanked and none of my stops were executed. When I called them up to find out what had happened they said their computer had gone down for awhile and they couldn't be held responsible because even the exchanges's computers go down sometimes. I agreed that was true, but when the NASDAQ goes down, the price of the stocks stay the same since noone can trade. Anyway, fastest $3000 I ever spent.