How good is IB market data access?

Is what you say officially documented somewhere?

 

A creative solution, but not a good substitute for real-time quotes. First the bars only include OHLC info, not the bid or ask, so if the bid/ask changes but no trades in the bar, your algo has stale data. Second I believe the lowest resolution that IB API allows is 5 second bars. That is way too slow for real-time algos.

 

OP said he is only interested in pricing data every 1 or 5 minutes. The bid/ask is kind of irrelevant in this context. And I thought to remember that one can specify whether the bars are constructed from trades only or bid/ask/mid. For example, fx historical bars can't be based on trades.

 

Which part specifically? Most is from own experience...

 

Sarcasm+ i usually label mine as such.
Thier data maybe better than a average;
but i never used a brokerage only for my quotes. I have no idea how they are for R 3k