IB froze on me four times today with question marks in the quote window. Two times this afternoon the market gapped down 4 pts on ER2 by the time IB recovered. How did TradeStation, Esignal, IQFeed, OpenTick and other providers/platforms hold up? I used to be a TS customer and would experience major lock ups on days like today.
if IB is freezing on you, I bet you are using the web version. IB is rock solid for me. I use the stand alone version. I run a lot of other stuff at the same time also. No probs.
i IB smart routed an etf marketable limit order that sat marketable for 20 secs without getting filled before the mkt ran away, and the trade desk couldn't explain why the anomalous route to inet instead of to the nbbo robbed of 100 bucks on a day when there was too much going on to chase it down by a .... 'routing anomaly'
Jayford, I use the stand along version as well but I did upgrade to version 867.4 this morning before market opened. I also run two charting packages (MultiCharts & Ensign) plus ButtonTrader, all of which use the IB API for data feeds. I've used Ensign+IB+BT for over a year now with no problems but added MultiCharts two months ago. I updated Java and TWS this evening so we'll see how it performs tomorrow. If I still have problems I may back off MultiCharts for a while. Thanks for your input
towards the end of the day i smart routed an opening order to add 100 shares to an existing short as limit at the current inside bid which was showing 100 shares (i believe at the nyse). the stock was an etf that doesn't require downtick and the order went immediately green. the quote was not crossed it sat unfilled for a decent pause. can't remember whether it traded lower or the bid dropped first, but i didn't get a fill. i called the trade desk with the order still active, and it apparently went to island and/or inet (not sure if island is a subset of inet). maybe i'm missing something here but the bottom line is i smart routed a marketable order that sat for a decent amount of time and never filled. unfirm quotes are an annoying expense and an unethical profit center
I might not be up to date with all the recent changes at NYSE, but if we assume that the relevant NYSE rules have not changed, then this is my explanation of what happened. The bid for 100 shares, at NYSE, had already been executed or withdrawn, and was therefore no longer available, before your order even reached NYSE. This bid continued to be displayed, after it had already been executed or cancelled, because the execution or cancellation was manual, and the specialist was slow to update his bid to show that the 100 share bid was no longer available. IB's SMART router had no way to recognize the order would not be executed until NYSE updated its quote, at which time SMART correctly re-routed the order to INET. The routing was not "anomalous". The fault here is that of the structure of manual trading at NYSE, not IB. IB's TWS provides options to help avoid this type of problem. One of those options allows you to instruct IB's SMART-router to avoid routing orders to NYSE or AMEX when they are displaying a quote for 100 shares; this is helpful because routing orders to NYSE/AMEX quotes for 100 shares usually will not result in an execution at that price, and will instead encounter delay and slippage. A stronger option is to instruct the SMART-router only to route to NYSE/AMEX at times when they are guaranteeing immediate automatic execution of their displayed quote. One of the problems with using the option to route to NYSE/AMEX only when quotes are immediately electronically executable is that the current trade-thru rule might prevent any other market center from giving you an execution until after the NYSE/AMEX updates its non-automatically executable quote. This problem will go away later this year, when Regulation NMS provisions will become effective which will allow electronic executions to trade thru more slowly updated manually executable quotes.
IB worked great for me yesterday. Noticed a few disconnects, but that could be my crappy satellite internet. My orders are always automated limit tho. My experience may not apply to "real time" traders. Good luck to all.