Was able to place an order just now. Data looks good. Took me a few minutes to login but seems ok for US stocks.
Managed to liquidate my straddle manually. My automated strategy can't retrieve data thru IB gateway. gasp!!!
As of this time I can successfully log in to TWS and pull up a list of my positions. However, I'm unable to get real time market data. (usfarm, ushmds, usopt are all disconnected). This seems to be happening to me often on Mondays, and I'm starting to get concerned if IB can be used for any form of active trading. Fortunately I am not a day trader, but if I had happened to what to buy/sell a position today (for whatever reason), I'm not sure I'd be confident to do that. This is somewhat disturbing thing to realize about a brokerage firm. With regards to customer service, they seem to be on the decline over the years. 10+ years ago, I had no problems. Now, with a much larger account size, I seem to get less helpful service.
My data is real time, but still showing a couple of farm connections out, so not taking a trade on IB. I did take a trade on Schwab, and confirmed I won't be using it for active day trading.