I have been using IB's TWS BookTrader for more than a year and I love it. It has super fast 1click execution and no popups, ever. But I only use it for trading forex. I have been thinking to try it with futures, but now I am not so sure. Could someone who tried it tell me if BookTrader is as good for futures as it is for forex? thanks in advance.
I have used IB Booktrader for as long as it has been around on futures - mostly bonds but often the mini's, currency futures and very infrequently the grains. The only problem I have had is a fill (most often a stop) when IB price does not show it. (Due to the nature of its snapshot of price instead of all information). Fills at market are near instantaneous (buy the ask, sell the bid). No problems at all.
I have to admit IB is truly shit for trying to trade anything with. I would never trade futures with it. Here are some issues, at night I cancel a GTC order and try to replace it with another. It does not let me replace it correctly, and a pop up comes up saying close, I click yes, and it then lists all my open positions as close on open. So I have to manually cancel all of these orders out, and it still will not let me place a sell order for that 1 position until the next day during market hours so I was not able to close out at a better profit. Then another time, I place an order to buy 5 calls again at night since the software sucks so badly I rather not do trades during the day. I wake up with a 500 call position. I call their support team, and they say the best thing I can do is just close the position out. So I close all but 150 calls since earnings are coming up, and I still think the overall plan is good but I lose commissions. Also, I place a trade on 1 stock, and IB says that it will not give me a quote on it since its from a country not in the United States unless I subscribe to their data feed. Instead I use yahoo finance to look up the price and place the trade, I get a pop up warning saying some shit about its not good to place trades on stocks where we don't give you a quote since you did not pay for a quote, I say fuck you to IB and press send, so the order does fill at my price even though IB does not give a quote, I can watch the stock on yahoo finance instead. My advice would be close your IB account, and put the money into a futures broker that has a good front end like Ninja Trader.
IB is a good futures broker with Ninja Trader as a front end for trading. Where else will you find a futures broker with SIPC protection? (Does TOS sweep funds like IB?) In fact, commissions are better than most others, like TOS, Mirus or Amp. That being said, their intraday margins for active day traders sucks as well as the data feed - can't beat Mirus here for their Zenfire or day trading margins. (Won't even get into their comparing customer sevice departments. )
I've traded IB TWS for over ten years. Lots of futures products, forex, stocks and bonds. I've had occasions where contingent stops get skipped over and not execute, but I'm not holding over so I catch it. I have other futures and forex accounts as well with other brokers, dealers and ECNs, with and without front ends. I can make anything work. The worst thing about IB forex is the non-base currency residual they ding you for....... And the inept customer service or lack thereof Some in here say they have better future rates than IB's $4.25 RT, maybe they trade 1000s of contracts/week. But I'd like to hear what people are getting, seriously and with whom!
You have to view the message popups once. Then just click the "DON'T FRICKEN SHOW THIS AGAIN" box: Display TWS Messages Each time you receive an information or confirmation message in TWS, we include a checkbox in the bottom left corner with the text "Don't display this message again." If you elect to hide a message, you can enable it again at any time using the Messages section of the Global Configuration tool. To enable a TWS message 1.On the Configure menu select Global Configuration. 2.Click Messages in the left pane. 3.Use the right panel to check any messages you want to enable. Note: This page can only be used to enable messages that you have turned off, not to disable messages. We want to ensure you have read each message at least one time before you elect to disable it.
I repeat AFAIK, there is no way to disable the popup window I am referring to. It asks you to cancel one of your orders before proceeding . As if you would want to cancel your stops BEFORE you are flat. What did I tell you, the people designing TWS are clueless about trading, these people are only playing with your money, that's what , you are their guinea pig. Aside from one or two guys , the helpdesk people are clueless, they don't understand a trader's logic when placing orders, they don't understand what you do. I am sick of these amateurs in software development, they are a nuisance , they bring no value, they destroy your account. They don't know that YG can move $66 per contract per second, that ANY delay with popups , messages can cause debilitating losses. The other reason is also they are looking out for their own interest as always, and could care less about what happened to your account.
Now I know what popup you are referring to. There is defiinitely a possibility to disable it. I had the same on BookTrader. There is a button called "close position". The default with IB is, if you manually close a trade, the STOP order stays there and can get triggered. This popup asks you if you want to close your open orders along with your trade (inclusive your Stop order), or not. There is a checkbox on this popup saying "remember my decision". If you check this, it will never ask you again, and there will be no more popups. I actually use this button daily, without any problems. You should have given yourself time to learn how to use TWS before jumping into live trades. There is a paper trading account you can use to learn the handling of the platform. TWS is different from other platforms, and definitely has a steep learning curve. If you learn it, you'll see it is a really powerful and stable platform. But many people never take the time to learn it, because it is quite demanding. It is like learning to configure a Linux box. Some people see an advantage in it, many prefer to stay with Windows. Maybe you do not want and never will learn to handle TWS. In this case either you have to use a third party frontend (you can also use Ninja with IB), or go for another broker.