This is getting old. Is this an IB problem? Any tricks to get around this? Check out the realtime chart for SPY. jeff
Here's a workaround for you. Don't display an actual trades bar chart, which is what you are doing. Make instead a line chart of the bid/ask. Or try a bar chart of the bid/ask midpoint. Or, if you are determined to observe a bar charted price series of actual trade, then chart SPY@ISLAND instead of SPY@SMART. These workarounds will not only eliminate your problem, they are also, in my opinion, truer displays of the market level. NYSE and AMEX specialists, and poor routing decisions by brokers, cause actual trade prices to occur far away from the market, so that there is a lot of noise in the series of trade prices. The SMART bid/ask spread, and its midpoint, on the other hand, are not vulnerable to such manipulation, and instead give a better reflection of the true market. I think that charting SPY@ISLAND is inferior to charting the b/a spread, but since ISLAND is a true market, unlike NYSE or AMEX or the larger entire national system, actual ISLAND trades are a better representation of the true market than are the composite trade prices from all markets combined. I guess that if you are also focused on volume indications, rather than just price, then most or all of what I am saying goes out the window. But if you are focused primarily on price action, rather than price and volume, then these workarounds should help you. Have you complained to IB customer service about this problem?