Is there any way to prove that you didn't place an order through IB? For example, let's say you place a limit order to buy at 10.00, and you get filled at 10.20. You call IB, and they tell you that you placed the order to buy at 10.20. Aside from recording your screen during trading, it seems like you have to take their word for it. (An audit trail really wouldn't help.)
I don't understand. The audit trail should show what was entered and what was executed. IB can have problems, but over 4 years and thousands and thousands of limit order trades, I've never seen something like that happen. Are you sure you didn't just accidently click in the order when the "limit price pulldown" popup was showing 10.20, or maybe you had the default order type set to MKT and didn't realize it? Strange...
What I'm asking is, how do you know the order was received correctly on their end? That's where the audit trail starts. Is there any way to verify the order that you placed, before it got to them?
We are talking about the audit trail that resides on your computer. It logs everything TWS was doing that day. All orders sent should be there. It must be enabled, though.
Even with audit trail disabled the information is available in your TWS on your PC. In your C drive you have a 'JTS' folder. In that folder you'll find log files for the last 5 business days, 'log.tue.txt' for example. This file has connectivity heart beats and other data so it's large and not easy to navigate through but it will contain limit price printed from your TWS.
Toonces, IB's TWS' order accepting mechanism indeed has bugs. The bugs are more prominent now after they have introduced unbundled commissions rate. Besides, Their real-time buying power may not necessarily be real-time. In addition, IB' liquidation algorithm and TWS' order accepting algorithm sometimes have difference of opinions even in a simple cash account--and even for simple buy limit orders. IB's software can change the numbers owing to the bugs. A couple of IB's order accepting mechanism's bug is as follows. Let's consider the following 2 orders Order1: --------- (original order) ABC stock 300share BUY LMT 28.0 (attached order) ABC stock 200share BUY LMT 27.0 Order2: --------- (original order) PQR stock 400share BUY LMT 26.0 (attached order) PQR stock 500share BUY LMT 25.0 Suppose you have plenty of buying power, IB's TWS' will let you place and transmit both the orders as valid orders. But after the order *fully* gets executed, you will see find out in the trade summary that the number of shares have been changed. Basically IB is executing a different number of shares than you told them to. You can still prove that you did not place/transmit one specific order the way IB's CSR is saying or IB's audit-trail is saying. Taking a colored snapshot of the TWS' grids or just the "Pending" page may help your argument. [But as a trader, it may not be very practical to go through snapshots each time you enter any trade.] You can also file SEC complain if your case is strong. But I hope you do not have to go that far. Also make sure if you yourself indeed did not make a typo and thought it was IB's mistake.
GTC, I think you're saying that they reduced the size of an order because of risk management reasons. That's hardly the same thing as changing the price of a limit order that Toonces is describing. I've never seen such a thing happen. While I'm not privvy to the internals of TWS or the IB servers, it does look like the audit trails in TWS are interpretations of the FIX messages that are sent to the server, given the naming and the way they are organized. These messages carry checksums, as do the packets/frames that they are wrapped in (at several levels). It's close to impossible that the message that is eventually processed by the server is different from the one that is sent by TWS.
alanm, I was not saying that they reduced the size of an order because of risk management reasons. Note that I have mentioned thatthe discrepancy can be seen even in an order that IB's TWS thinks *fully* executed. It can be seen even in an IRA account even if you have enough buying power according to TWS.