This is new to me? Why Do you think that IB will delay the exection If you go with unboundled package?
bundled or unbundled refers to comissions. so please explain what that has to do with execution. i am really interested in that explanation.
So much misinformation here it is astounding. IB doesn't withhold orders. IB doesn't play games with client orders. The goal of IB's routing is to obtain the best fills for it's clients. In fact, independent studies show that IB's price improvement is 28 to 53 cents better than the industry during the first half of 2010 according to an independent study conducted by TAG. That's for the US. What is even more surprising is the massive gap in price improvement for European shares where our price improvement is a gargantuan 2.84 euros over the industry norm. I'll quote from some recent literature we put out which refers to these stats. "Our results are even more impressive when you consider that other industry-touted statistics only note the percent of orders that saw price improvement, and conveniently ignore the percent of their orders that were dis-improved or had no improvement and do not include the amount of price improvement. Our statistics are netted, showing the true bottom-line price improvement including all improved, dis-improved and unimproved amounts and the average price improvement of the executions. " I suggest getting the thread back on topic and skip the accusations and innuendo that some of you are posting here and elsewhere w/o any factual evidence.
Regarding the speed of execution issue. I believe IB has a US, European and Asian data centers. So, if you, say, trade American futures from Europe you can request direct connectivity to the American data center... and this will be faster. If you are associated with a European data center, your orders will be routed to the US but they will be sent back to Europe for margin approval, which generates a delay. Another thing is IB doesn't have order execution streamlined for major aconomic events like last week's QE announcement. If you get caught with an internet connection in such an event it may take 2-3 seconds (as opposed to normal 0.2-0.3 seconds) for an order to get accepted by IB
I understand that the only way of accessing IB servers directly through Internet is using a VPN (150$ commissions /month minimum + 700$ one time setup fee). Has anybody done that? Has speed improved after excluding IB gateway?