Usually TWS will reconnect very quickly without you noticing it. But recently I've begun to question just how reliable my ISP is. Its supposed to be one of the boutique ISPs for businesses. I've been listening to streaming music and occasionally, the stream is dropped. There have been 2 multi hour outages at the ISP this year- I suspect there were other much briefer outages as well. Sometimes the internet as a whole can get congested and will drop a socket connection (between TWS and the IB server or between esignal and its data servers).
If TWS works on one machine but not another, you may have a Java network card conflict. http://www.interactivebrokers.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.pl?153/153 Note: System crashes, reboots, lockups and loss of functionality have been linked to problematic network cards conflicting with Sun's Java. The following are a list of cards that have been linked to these crashes: Accton (acton) - All Models Linksys - All Models Netgear - All Models SMC - Model 1255 US Robotics - All Models Consult the User's Guide and Technical FAQ for further information.
I also would like to be able to save my alarms. This is most irritating if we have a flame out and have to close and restart TWS during trading hours. You can never get all the alarms reset and keep trading.............. help!!!!!
For those of you who do not have enough capital to cover your emini positions with the QQQ's or Spyders, you could offset with the Dow mini YM which trades on the CBOT. Now this could work with IB if it is just an exchanged related outage. It appears to trade close to a 1 to 1 ratio. One problem I see is if you place a stop and target with your initial order (which I do) you really don't know what your position is. Obviously there is always going to be risk when trading sometimes you can define it (options) other times you can't. If you want security there is always Mc Donalds, the Post Office and High School teaching, oops, perhaps those were bad examples. The search continues... regards, Bruce Hawkins