The midnight disconnect is separate from the Tws scheduled exit you are referring. This is an IB disconnect from their servers not anything that can be controlled from the client side.
Limited number? This sounded like it happens to everyone who uses them. Are you sure they don't have to reboot their 1 Windows server - you know, to clear up memory...
I generally leave IB up only if I have some live orders out. They are still live after the disconnect.
It does. IB has in excess of 150,000 accounts. Let's say that 2/3rds of them are on-line at one time. So IB has 100,000 Internet or leased line active connections to their server farms. Let's say that each server can handle 100 customers. Further, assume the servers are distributed in a number of "farms." Thus, about 1000 servers. IB actually has trading servers and data servers so my estimate is probably off but the precise number doesn't really matter for explaining my idea. What I was suggesting in my post was that during the resets (which do not occur at the same time for all customers - I see different resets for my "live account " machine and my "paper trading account" machine) IB updates the software on 10 per cent of the servers or about 100 servers. This would allow them to monitor performance of the update, and in the event of a major glitch, fail the bad servers and force a transfer to an un-updated server. IB does not publish this info, but from the occasional comment issued after some thankfully rare failure, we IB customers do know they have backup systems. Also, the TWS has the capability to show you what the status of your connectivity is to the various data server farms. There are four or five named farms I'm aware of. In thinking about thjs further, if there are indeed 1000 servers, taking 10 per cent of them off-line each night and forcing us to transfer to another server would allow them to do maintenance on a progressive basis and not have to do it all when the markets are closed on Saturday. They could have most of their IT staff work a normal workday rather than heavy up when the markets are closed (which is getting to be almost never). Jack
Here in the Houston area i get two disconnects on a regular basis. One usually starts at approx 11.02p and then again at about 11.24p central time. i never have to restart TWS to get data flow going again.
Bottom line - you need to use a different broker if you want to trade through the "shaky" period beginning around midnight eastern. IB obviously doesn't care about any lost business resulting from their nightly interruption of data flow.
You dont have to move Broker. You can ask IB to move you to the european or asian servers, these have different reset times. You can chose the ones that are most suitable for your trading. I think you can even create a sub account and have that one allocated to a different location.
You can have another account that is on one of the other servers and (almost) instantly move funds from one account to another throughout the day. This way you are not locked into one server time frame to schedule your trading. I trade currencies and use this setup for round the clock trading.
My problem is I can't tell ahead of time what time would be "convenient" for a reset within a given 24-hr period. It depends on what's happening in the markets and whether I'm in a trade, close to getting a new signal, etc. ... The other problem I have is that since I use IB charts (believe it or not) and I do alot of annotating, I wouldn't want to have to keep up 2 sets of charts/annotations, one for each account. I monitor and annotate about 15-16 charts, buy the way.
According to IB's website, the asian servers reset at 5:30pm EST. I am thinking about having my account relocated there because this timeframe is great for overnight trading as well as US day.