First of all, I'm a big IB fan and a very happy customer. But it seems I have to take my forex trading elsewhere. One order, half gets executed ok at Idealpro, second half gets executed 36 pips lower at Ideal (GBP/USD 09:30:03 GMT at 1.9701) BTW each execution is 1 lot, so the minimal transaction size bug is not an issue. Sitting around 4 hours already on IB helpdesk chat "...they still looking into it".
I just got a reply from chat. Still doesn't sound right: Rico E: ok, I received now the message from our technicians Rico E: according to them the following happened : Rico E: at the time when you placed the order, Ideal Pro did not had any quotes ( none of the market makers in Ideal Pro did provided you a bid / ask price ) Rico E: and therefore our system automatically routed the order to Ideal Rico E: then about 0.5 second later, Ideal pro displayed again a market price Rico E: and because of that you received the 2nd execution then over ideal pro and not over ideal *me*: so should i feel lucky that at least half of my order got executed at fair market price? Rico E: I would say yes, because if Ideal Pro did not have posted a bid / ask, you would have received another execution over Ideal *me*: But i sent my order to idealpro, not ideal. If there wasn't any market on Idealpro, my order should have been rejected. Rico E: this is the way the Ideal and Ideal Pro are setup in our system. Unfortunately I can not argue or give you a compensation for this execution because this a management decision. The best would be, if you seek for compensation, to write us an email to help@interactivebrokers.com so we could forward this as a complaint to our management.
enough is enough... this ideal vs idealpro business sucks Anytime the marketmakers at Ideal decide to pull their quotes we are going to get a bad (i)deal?
hey guys how does the ideal and ideal pro thing work? if i want to convert from one currency to the other, what should i watch out for?
What Rico said was not accurate. Another bank was posting a quote at 1.9689. We will not route to IDEAL if no IDEAL PRO participants are quoting. Only when they have posted a market and IDEAL has a better market. If the IDEAL quote was pulled on this order, you would have been filled at 1.9689. I'm not sure what caused the other banks to pull their quotes at this time. We will look into this and consider changing the logic for routing to Ideal. It might be a good idea to require multiple bank quotes. I'll come back when I know how this can be avoided in the future.
Another important point is this was a market order. Firing off market orders while a currency is spiking down is risky regardless of the safeguards we build into the routing logic.
unbelievable. banks can decide when to pull. of course these are the money changers themselves so doesn't come as a surprise.
Banks are very careful when news is released. They are not in business to get picked off by people chasing the tape. Sharp price changes result in rejections because of the price changes. Most banks don't allow 'slippage' limits through NBBO. It's not a simple issue. We don't want to route back to someone who just rejected an order, but you don't want to disqualify a competitive market. Bottom line, we'll try to improve routing logic to avoid this type of fill, but you will always have issues sending market orders when news is released.