just for the sake of providing some real sample of blown stops, today I put small amount of money on the line, and caught a blown stop and have sent the details to IB help desk.... Let's see what happens. I hope this can work out... one nice feature about IB is that you can have many outstanding orders open and it doesn't decrease your buying power as long as they are not executed... with other brokers, you have a couple of set ups put in and buying power quickly diminishes. If IB cannot solve this problem, I am afraid have to try RJT.
One of IB's reps checked the audit trail of a blown stop sample I provided yesterday and has confirmed the instance where 2 bids were above the election price for a stop buy order and the stop was not triggered. According to the rep, the case will be investigated further.. meanwhile, I would encourage everyone who has the same problem to forward details of blown stops (account number, ticker symbol, buy/sell, election price and the time you saw the order should be triggered but was not) to IB helpdesk so that the programmers may have more data to debug with. def, thanks for your follow through on this issue. It's much appreciated.
I'm pretty new to IB. I like their TWS system overall. Great commissions. Customer service leaves a bit to be desired. In any case, the stop problem is of great concern to me. I've had numerous stops blown through. Yesterday, I had a sell stop blown through when there was clearly 2 offers at the stop price. The stop never activated, and the position closed down 20 cents below my stop. On top of that, the stop that was pending simply disappeared from my pending screen -- but no activation! Luckily I was trading very small to get the hang of the system. If I had a large position, I would be pretty angry right now, since 20 cents represented a down move of 1.5%. We MUST have confidence in IB's stop system. The commissions are great. But at large sizes, 1.5% lost due to stops being blown through is more costly than using another broker with higher commissions but more reliable stops. And I do not want to stare at the computer screen all day so that I can manually put in a sell order if the stop is not activated. Wet (Oh, Def, in case you ask, YES I sent this to the help desk and I am waiting for a reply. But you simply MUST acknowledge that there is a stop problem here with your system that MUST be fixed).
Being that I don't usually use automated stops (preferring to watch my positions in real time and trigger them manually), I wasn't really aware of this problem with IB's stop system. I might recommend to Def, and subsequently IB, that if it is too difficult for IB to hold the stops themselves, program it into the software so that IB's servers don't have to hold the orders. Granted, it's not ideal, in that it would require a trader to keep his/her TWS running in order for the stop to be triggered, but it seems that anything would be better as long as it guarantees steady operation of stops.
wet, dozu888 sent some info to the help desk which showed that a stop should have been triggered on an nasdaq stock. The detailed info was forwarded to a few people. I haven't had the opportunity to talk to any of them yet but hopefully they'll be able to determine what is happening. Sounds like NYSE works fine, futures fine, but nasdaq has hiccups. zboy, i think having stops resident at the local computers would lead to more unreliability. i'm 100% sure though and I'll bring it up after I hear back on my other questions.
IB Screws up again!!!!!!!Stop order, hell any order!!!! Once again: bot 300 JNPR at 59.95 Stop mkt sell put in at 60.75 with mkt at 60.90 NO FILL AS MKT PRICE PASSES THROUGH MY STOP PRICE AND PROCEEDS TO 59.85!! I PUT IN A SEPARATE ORDER TO SELL AND STILL GOT NO FILL, CURRENTLY WAITING ON LIVE HELP FOR THE LAST 15 MINUTES. ibhelp2 says I have no sell order executed, JNPR currently at 59.46 Is this a screw job or what? they will probably come back later and tell me I sold it so if I sell it now I will end up short without knowing it!! This has happened to me before!! Interactive Brokers can lock up on you with no hope for you!!! This sucks!!!