Yeah the extra click you have to do to accomplish almost anything makes it just about impossible to trade.
I'm not talking about the myriad of popup warnings in TWS (which I agree, can all be turned off.) I'm talking about the warning that appears near the inside/bottom of the "Orders" activity window that appear when you have the orders filtered for "LIVE", "CANCELLED" or "COMPLETED". The only way to clear this every time I start TWS is to switch to each one of my order tabs, manually change them to be "ALL", and then switch them away from "ALL" and back to one of the LIVE/CANCELLED/COMPLETED filters. The global config has no way to turn this annoyance off.
3. You cant sort with your scanner based on %change from open, only way to sort is by dollar change from open,(Which is pretty much useless when your criteria is stocks between a dollar and 100.) A 1 dollar stock that makes a 30 cent move should not end up lower on the sort list than a 100 dollar stock thats makes a 3 dollar move. This is common sense. I work with custom built TWS scaners via API. So this can be done
Amen. IB is amazing in some ways. In other ways it is comical. If they would develop a front-end for active traders, they would attract a giant client base that can't use them currently for lack of speed and configurability. The platform is slow. Changing symbols is a nightmare. How many clicks or keyboard buttons should this really take? Lightspeed for example is symbol + enter. The way it should be. Can't have more than 3 book traders up? I could use the regular level 2 if it let me keyboard trade through it. And those keyboard shortcuts in the book trader are a joke. Message to IB: want more traders and big commissions from active guys? Copy a true daytrader's platform like Lightspeed. And consider being less strict on those margins. I use multiple brokers and stocks that are completely marginable at the others require 100% at IB sometimes. Maybe if you require that those "risky" stock positions be closed by EOD, you can make them be marginable.
Wow... I guess I will wait for IB to fix these things. I was going to go back over there...but eh...no I will wait another decade when they get around to fixing issues important to traders. If these things have been complained about for a decade to deaf ears then I can see that IB is not trader friendly. I think that is the point. ES
IB added 7,900 new accounts bringing in $3.9b in customer equity in March. Average $493,670 per account. I am guessing these are investors not daytraders.
Would you be willing to share that fix? I will literally pay someone a thousand bucks if they can send me something i can use to fix the sort by %change from open column. I dont know anything about programming so i cant fix it myself.
I would stay at IB for all my trading in a heartbeat if they made it easy, they are the only broker ive been with in 12 years that has been reliable. It really is the worst catch 22 in history, cause i dont need the leverage of a propfirm anymore, but every time i bring my accounts back there i run into the same problem, their software is simply garbage. I find it hard to believe anyone who actually trades has ever worked on that platform cause there is so many simple errors. I mean, i paid over 50k last year in comissions and ecn fees, IB could hire a dedicated programmer to fix simple errors pretty much for the amount I am costing them alone, and im a piker, so the amount of money they are costing themselves is almost unfathomable. I just cant believe that from a business perspective they dont understand this. Ive traded at places where there was rollign black outs in the software, every three to four days the software would glitch out for a half an hour, and thats still more user friendly than TWS., because while it worked, it was very easy/fast, and very friendly to use. I used to fucking hate that system, but I would still take that over TWS if they didnt go out of business.
Seems like lunacy that company that took in 7900 traders in a month cant figure out basic software adjustments after years and years of being in business. 1 dollar per trader would pay for a full time programmer to fix these issues if they even give a shit.