Hi Kernfusion, Oh yes you are right. Your system should know your orders for sure. So the question is how you keep your record of transactions, either by 1) your system, or 2) IB system (activity log), or your manual order log (this is exactly I do today), to calculate your performance. I will try the #2 approach. Thank you!
By the way, if I would give one advice to me of 3 months ago, it would be: "Know market open hours for the instruments you trade" I started my trading even without this knowledge, and it was like walking in the dark. Now I can schedule my day as I now know when I should place orders by market. There must be many others like this which I do not know today. It is all about experience and I hope time (and hard work of course) will solve all these.
yes, for me it's #1, although, I also look at IB statistics once in a while, because there might be bugs in my system. The annoying thing is that the two never match . There are multiple reasons for that, one is that P&L from foreign currency-denominated futures comes in that currency, and I have to periodically convert it manually, so my system can't possibly know when exactly it was done. There are also other reasons for the mismatches, and at some point I just gave up on trying to fix\resolve them all. So now I just sometimes roughly compare IB stats with my system stats and if they're close enough - it's good enough
I don't combine it in one account. I have one login name at IB, and then two account numbers (Uxxx). One of these I use for this futures trading system; the other for simple ETF buy/hold type of investment. So it is easy to track the performance of each separately.
The other one is: "know when the markets are having holiday" Especially if you use exchanges in multiple countries you'll discover that the holiday calendars are very different.
This info I think is wrong. IB still gives me the error message unless you refresh Kernel. I thought the error went away simply because I started to use "re-start the Kernel, then re-run the whole notebook" function (JupyterLab). Sorry about the wrong report. To be honest I don't understand what Kernel is all about. There's much to learn.
Hi HobbyTrading! I did not know that you can have 2 separate account numbers in a single account. I will investigate if I can do the same. Thank you!
I don't find this important yet. Could you please elaborate?? Is it important when you roll your contracts?
When you start your program you connect to IB, using command eConnect(). This command includes the setting of your clientId. Before you close your program you have to disconnect from IB, using eDisconnect(). This tells IB that the clientId will not be used any more. And that it can be re-used in the future. If you don't disconnect before closing your program and then restart your program using the same clientId IB gets confused as they believe that this clientId is already in use. In that case you get to see the error message which you showed.
Depending on how you implement your automated trader it could get confused if you submit an order and nothing is happening due to a holiday. You mention rolling contracts: some people roll very early and then the holidays don't matter much. However, if you roll late and the expiration date is after a holiday you might run into problems.