Not sure I follow. Are you talking about IB's FX Trader window? Or are you talking about IDEALPRO as a whole, meaning their entire FX ECN platform on the back end?
I tested the IB sim account and found no noticeable difference in the bottom line between sim and live. This is not true of other sim accounts I know of.
I suspect the size of the orders and the asset type also has a factor. How liquid the asset and how large the orders? What were your tests based on?
Side-by-side order entries performed by hotkeys on equally-configured TWS platforms. Futures orders from 1 to 100 cars, at various times of day.
As far as the simulated account Vs. real account. I tried comparing two at two different brokers. Real money account at IB and simulated account at OpenECry. Open ecry fills were consistently different (worse). I pointed that out to the guys at OEC. They buffed it off saying "it is propostrous to complain about a demo account".
TRANSLATED: "We don't know the answer to your question, nor even where to start, and since our money is not at risk ['we don't trade'] with our own platform, we choose to attack you instead."
simulation account is the same as real one, at least in my tests, and I ran a lot of them. don't confuse simulation account with free edemo/demouser account that it's totally different and pretty slow (and it's just fine, because it's for IDE/API testing for ppl/software developers without any IB acccount, and there are thousands out there taking the valuable bandwith), doh.
As far as IB's SIM and real goes the real account is a machine, never even blinks. Now the SIM accounts has problems like stops not being hit, order not executing, frozen and things like that. They know about this period. However from a person that has both account open at the same time all the time the problems are short in duration. i.e. If it is not working turn it off wait 10-20 minutes and it is normally back to normal. When it is working it is exactly the same as live. Point is it works perfectly and you have to be able to tell when hey it's lagging right now I will SIM later when it is back to normal which normally is a reasonable amount of time. All I am saying is SIM and Live are identical in every respect when in working order. If it's not working then its just not working not different. Calling IB to talk about SIM is a futile endeavor and will only get you flagged as a trouble client if you call repeatedly about SiM.
Lorenzo, are you talking about regular day session, or after hours? At around 11:30PM-12:00PM EST, IB has its "moment of truth" Everybody experiences the same EXPECTED trouble(s) in this particular moments (relatively narrow time window)-- it's technical time (not for us, traders, but their pesonnel to do some sort of maintenance). I cannot believe that you experience any prolonged troubles with your real and/or simu IB account. I keep both activated sometimes -- one I trade, and use another to run my automated trading tests / new strategies etc. Well, sh*t happens, and sometimes during regular session you can get some alert window popping up, warning about some malfunction in some of the exchanges and/or IB itself. I trade every day, except Saturday and half of Sunday, and I don't see what you see by some reason. Check your connection and ISP provider, or make sure you use the same settings/xml files in TWS for real and simu accounts. Run full antivirus check, defragment hard drive. Make chkdsk /f on each of partitions / drive volumes, etc.