I totally agree and was not making fun of you. Any serious trading requires something like this. At the moment I have a best friend 'on watch' - if I don't call him until Friday evening to say 'all ok', he will log in to my account and close positions. We do it every week, but I would like to my broker do it for me.
I guess it was the way you asked the question. Let's put it this way. If you enter a legal order that makes it way to an exchange, that is executable at your price either with a limit or market order, then the exchange has rules that state what you're entitled to. If there is a problem getting an execution, your broker should be your advocate on your behalf to get you what your entitled to. If you're still unhappy, you have the ability to take either the broker or the exchange to arbitration. Does that help? 1245
sure, or maybe I should start over and just remove the word guarantee from my question which seems to be something you are completely focused on. All I care for is that they give their "best effort" to close out my positions and hey, if once in 20 years, they have a system failure and could not do it, I'm fine with that. And if they don't have such a thing, then I'm just wondering what other people are doing to work around potential local network and power outages. thanks.
Buy a dedicated server and install custom software on it that checks your positions and/or a database of safety checks you designate. It will be separate from your network and power grid and many of the dedicated server hosting companies offer 99.9% guarantee of up-time. The details of doing this you'd need to figure out yourself but with the right amount of $$ and/or skill it can be done rather easily. Your second and probably cheaper solution is to have a laptop with a battery always at the ready, and a separate connection than the one network you're connected to. This second network might be like a mobile device since it's connections are usually not going thru the same backbones as the Cable/ADSL connections of internet providers.
thanks for all your input. braincell's suggestion sounds like a good long term solution: having a completely independent monitoring program on a different network and power grid. also stevegees reminder about IBs mobile TWS is a good one. thanks.
If you are leveraged up during the day won't they close positions when the overnight margin rate kicks in? Or do they just reduce positions..
Use a bracket order. Put a GTD time on the entry leg that will expire if you're unavailable for some reason. Attach two exit orders - one is a MOC order and the other is your regular exit. They will have the same OCA group, so if one fills the other gets cancelled. The only tricky element here is that you can't cancel the MOC order after the cut off time (think it's 3:50pm)...so you'll want to put a GTD time on the regular exit as well of 3:49:59. (In practice you'll have to make it 15-30 seconds earlier b/c IB is wildly inconsistent with how promptly they will cancel a GTD order) Obviously, this also means that after 3:50pm you can't submit regular exits because your MOC is going to execute. For the regular exit, if you don't have a pre-determined price that you want to get out at when submitting the bracket, you can simply enter the order well away from the market and have your ATS modify the price to a marketable level when it decides it's time to exit.
I strongly suggest renting a VPS to minimize the power & network failure events. For about $100 / month, you get peace of mind + ability to access your trading platform from anywhere in the world. I use a VPS from SpeedyTradingServers, very much happy with it (mine is hosted in Chicago, but they can also host in NYC, which is closer from the IB gateway, itself in NYC). To close you positions using a phone call, IB help-desk is always there but you can be waiting on the phone over 1h depending on the situation - really not ideal if you trade stocks.