Comp, Wrong. Speed is speed. If things are slower then it will come from a delay at the exchange which will affect all traders - fast and slow. When the pace car comes out during a race, every one slows down. Since you mention lease lines every time someone mentions IB is quick, I'll mention that if you are worried about hops and are a very active trader, you can also apply for a lease line direct into the IB server. I'm not going to go into details of the service here, if interested PM me or contact a sales rep. However, even though I know IB has the fastest servers, connections and the latest software on Globex, I still content that an extra 10-100 milliseconds once your under 1 third of a second is not going to make a difference in your profitability. If you are trading manually, your decision process will take longer.
One thing everyone should do is go to dslreports/tools and run their tweak test. It will help you set the RWIN number correctly. The defaults are too high in many cases and you may be getting the dreaded "latency > 2 sec" condition.
I agree but it all depends on the magnitude of the trader. Some people cannot afford too have a glitch with out a backup broker that is readily available in the event that a glitch does occur. Regards, Comp
Guess it all depends on a how you phrase it. If I said that IB had 98.75% uptime on the emini everyone would be saying how great it is. But that is in fact its uptime percentage according to my estimate. In Aug there was a half hour outage on the 2nd and a 50 minute outage later in the month. A 98% uptime if you use 30 hrs/ week for a 4 week month as the divisor. People who trade with size need a backup broker. The deep discount, electronic only brokers will never have the phone desk to handle trades when an outage effects many traders at once. One thing IB could do is put out a bulletin when the system is not functioning and put out another bulliten when the system is back up like they did yesterday. This would prevent people from submitting orders to an apparently functioning system and then having to call the cust service desk to straighten it out.
The Firm I am with offers all of what has been mentioned. We are a little picky as to who we offer these services too but in the event that we find somebody who expresses a need for it, we can meet those requirements. In short we try not to play the numbers game and acquire as many customers as possible so we can service our present customers to the fullest. Regards, Comp
I live in Baltimore, MD and go through Verizon DSL. What do I trace-route to get an idea on how long it takes to get to IB's systems? What is the name / IP address I should check out? I will report my findings. Thanks aphie