It seems kind of like IB is damned if they do, damned if they don't. Some of us, like me, request that IB emphasize better quality and reliability and order routing, by slowing down on the introduction of new features. Others request that IB speed up the introduction of new features. It will be impossible for IB to please everybody. I think that the fact that IB engages in any dialogue at all, on these issues, is a tremendous credit to IB, and one of the crucial reasons why IB is head and shoulders above its competition. Let's continue, with IBSoft and others, our healthy debate over IB's direction, but let's not forget what a great thing it is that IB lets us customers participate in this debate. Can you name any other broker who engages in such extensive communication with customers big and small? I guess the motivation, behind this posting of mine, is to remind all that if our very productive, healthy, public debate with IB employees becomes too negative in tone, the negativity might tend to discourage IB from continuing the dialogue. This would be a lose-lose proposition. I hope everybody concerned will see this as a healthy, productive debate, and that customers will show enough respect and appreication so that IB will be motivated to continue the dialogue.
Agree 100%. (You always have that diplomatic edge type thing going.) I worry that IB will eventually stop engaging customers with all the nitpicking and complaints. But hey, even if they decide that enough is enough and go quiet on the forums, they'd still be ahead of the competition.
If you owned a business and there was a public forum with your customers commenting and complaining, would you stop engaging?
Well said. You have both the maturity and intelligence to realize this. You also have sufficient patience and respect to the forum to think through what you want to say and then make a succinct and understandable post. Great many posters here are different. They don't use the spell-check or complete sentences, yet they find enough time to pepper their bitch-fest posts with smiley face, confused face and similar. Sometimes I can't actually believe that I respond to them. Anyway, we will continue to carefully listen to our customers and evaluate their suggestions. As to whether such dialog remains here, or we will move it our website/forum is now under debate. Moving the discussion there is tempting for several reasons.
Restore from a backup....you do have one, right? If not consider spending a few $100s and get an external drive and Norton Ghost, Acronis Trueimage or something similar and have it image your trading machine nightly. can come in real handy. I also use systemrecovery.com, $15 a month for 5 GB of offsite data backups. SSB
Just a heads up: I have also run into at least two "non documented" changes as it relates to the API 1. It's no longer possible to re-use clientId across sessions. I use the same setup for my trading account and demo account (for testing). I no longer can use the demo account after having used the trading account (using the same clientIDs). ClientIDs appears to be persistent across sessions - even after a reboot 2. TWS seems to have gotten picky about how time is specified. Not clear what the issue is, but i got all my GTD orders rejected with invalid time specification. I have generated 1000s of orders with the same code, so something is off there, too. Downgraded to 858 and everything works fine
You don't seem to like customers b*tching about IB, but you seem to have no problem b*tching about customers. Is that because your b*tching is spelled correctly? If you want to move your answers to another forum, that is your perogative, just as it's our perogative to choose who we do business with.
I am happy IB is constantly attempting to improve TWS. Think of how much better TWS is than the vast majority of retail front-ends. This would not be the case if they were afraid to upgrade due to customer complaints. While it is true that there usually are bugs in every upgrade they do, most of the bugs are not too serious and are ironed out relatively quickly. I generally use the previous release until the current one has been out for a while and the problems seem to be well defined. sometimes I upgrade sooner, but always have a backup to use if I don't like what is happening in the upgrade. I also have an extra system loaded with a prior release that I can switch on and use if necessary. If you are serious about your trading, I think having a backup and a spare computer is a must. after all, what if the hard drive, video card, network card, or RAM fails on your main system. Even if you have only one system, it's quite easy and pretty quick to shut down TWS and revert to an older version. Just keep a zipped prior version on your system or on CD.