For anyone keeping track, my pings to IB are around 330-350ms and a tracert comes out at 21 hops. I'm in northern Canada using dial-up@33.6. Might be the cold weather, currently -42C Steve
That's without the windchill. Actually I htink it has "warmed" up a few degrees since this morning. I'm not sure how cold it has to get before the pings slow down, or won't even leave the house! Steve, Brrrrrrrrrrrr
brutal !! its been 4-10 f. here( eastern PA) for the last several days. way too cold for me. must seem positively balmy to you LOL ! thanks for the system education nitro and everyone ! best, surfer
There are other issues besides average latency (pings). Unreliable connections, intermittent saturation of bandwidth limits (with DSL and cable), dropped packets, latency spikes and out of order packets will all introduce intermittent (spiking) lags into TCP streams. As far as I know, IB throttles each clientâs connection by not sending every tick. This helps avoid individual client overuse of bandwidth, saturation of local connections and server overload during extreme market activity. As a result IB will not lag as much as other data providers who try to push every tick and risk having their servers unable to meet peak demand. This is why I hope IB does not start sending every tick like many traders have asked for. At least if they do, it should be an option for only those who require it. If traders need to know every tick for proper evaluation of stop conditions, then perhaps IB should send high/low intervals, indicating the range of prices traded since the last update, without having to send too many ticks.
You're so right. Improving your odds to hit a guy in Quake before he moves is much more important than improving your odds to hit a bid before it moves. Seriously. You might get killed if you miss in Quake, it's not like slipping in trading will cost you anything. Personally, I just fill out order tickets on the backs of postcards and mail them to my broker. Sometimes I tape on a chocolate too... I think I get better fills that way (please don't let that last part out.. I don't want to give up too much of my edge).