Hey folks - I've been playing around with the Trade-Ideas API and connecting it to IB to paper trade using algos. I'm focusing on liquid OTC stocks right now. I'd say about half of the orders that my algo identifies are filled - and the other half are not. But oddly, for those that aren't filled automatically, I can MANUALLY order the same amount of shares on IB and get filled with no problem. So the issue of not getting filled automatically seems to be technical in nature. Getting a hold of the API desk at IB is enormously difficult, so if anyone has suggestions on how I might be able to resolve this, I would be most grateful. Thanks so much.
IBs execution for otc stocks is not very good. The market makers don’t want order flow from smart IB customers and they strong armed IB to make order execution / routing changes for the worse for the customers and better for the market makers.
It's very difficult to test paper trades since IB can only try to simulate this while having no idea which orders would go through in live trading. Not sure why API orders don't go through vs manual ones, but it could be a bug in TWS, or you may be doing something slightly differently via API than manually.