Has anyone else ever had an order routed to BEST get filled twice? I am 99% positive this happened to me today. I was long 800 shares at 10:00 (I was just too involved and didn't notice the time). When the market started to tank when the consumer confidence came out I exited my position pretty quickly, and sat back to watch. I then realized I was short 800 shares. I had been filled short for 800 on NASDAQ (in three different lots) and for 800 short on BTRADE (on one lot). I don't think there's any way I could have entered it twice accidentally. The fills are all within three seconds of each other and I didn't have two lines set up in TWS. I would complain to IB, but it ended up being my best trade of the day. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Johnny
due to the somewhat "clumsy" interface of TWS I have definitely placed orders I didn't intend to. As orders fill TWS will move and re-sort rows. I have more than once cancelled the wrong order, hit transmit on a pending profit exit etc. all because TWS removed and re-sorted rows. Maybe that's what happened to you. I have no instances where I got filled twice (that I'm aware of)
After hundreds of trades, I have had about four instances that were/are a bit of a mystery. I suppose I must have erred, on these instances, but I'm not really sure.
I have had these things happen several times in the two years I have been trading with TWS. I generally accept the loss or gain and do not call IB as I figure it was my error and the gains and losses have a way of averaging out. The advantages of using TWS far outweigh the disadvantages. However, I would much prefer the order lines on the TWS to not be resorted by TWS. This has for sure caused most of these problems. Catoosa
I had something similar happen to me about 3 weeks ago. I got an overfill for 500 shares. I placed an order to close a short position (1500 shares), and suddenly I was long 500 shares! I knew the order I placed was correct (buy 1500 shares, not 2000 shares), so I called them, and they took care of the 500 shares. The customer support person could find my original order, and agreed that the 500 shares were an error. I also asked him, what would have happened if I didn't call them, and just sold the 500 shares. He said that their software checks all orders every night, and they would call me and take those 500 shares out of my account. So this way, I could have ended up short. But they still haven't adjusted the commission for the overfill, although I sent them 2 emails already, and it's been 3 weeks!
I got filled an extra 300 shares on an 800 share order. It wasn't a big deal this time, either. I noticed it right away, sold the extra 300 for about even, and traded the rest the way I had planned. The extra 300 was executed 30 seconds after the first on NASDAQ (is that SOES?). Also, on the trade I posted earlier, on my end-of-day statement it was charged as one 1600 share order ($10.50). I didn't think you could flip your position in one order with IB. Hmmm... Def said he's looking into it, and I appreciate that. I really need to know if I'm crazy or not. -Johnny
IB has recently added additional logic to their BEST routing that internalizes splitting of mixed sell/short sell orders and ensures that the short sale portion is handled accordingly. Concerning the overfills, given the kinds of bugs I've come across with IB's BEST routing in the past I wouldn't be surprised if there's some race condition in IB's BEST algorithm that can trigger those under certain circumstances. The problem with such race conditions is that they tend to be very difficult to track down due to the variety of independent distributed systems involved. Dave