There are several posts throughout Elite Trader discussing Interactive Brokers' TraderWorkstation (TWS) system reliability. With the premise that those trading currencies are among those who have IB's platform running for the most hours every day... Any comments on system reliability of late and how things have fared if it was required to call in to close a position, etc.
sorry if this has already been asked in another post/thread, but why is the spread on the USD/CAD so wide compared to other pairs and other brokers? thanks.
5 pips with Refcofx. I don't see a problem with that, whats an extra 2 pips over the EUR/USD? If you are right with the direction 2 pips is squat.
actually ib spread on eur/usd is normally 1 or 2 pips and cad/usd most of the time is around 10 pips. and 2 pips extra is quite a lot for me, most strats make around 2000pips per year on 250 trades so an extra 2pips is an extra 1000 pips per year or 50% more costs.
With IB, the Order ID associated with executed trades is available to the account holder on Trade Date (T) only. The other broker(s) I trade with post this field in the system and reports, it is always available. I have been told that IB does not keep the Order ID after a certain amount of time. The Order ID and other fields associated with the trade may be easily copied to Excel on T. I would like to hear any comments on how people are recording their trades. Do you keep the Order ID? What if you did not get it on T, now it is T+1, too late... I plan on keeping the Order ID even though IB loses this. However, I have lost the Order ID on some trades as I did not get them on T (accustomed to having this information always available as a field associated with each trade's record). thx
Go to Configure - Misc and make sure that the box for "Create Audit Trail" is checked. Now each day's trading record is automatically saved in a subdirectory of your TWS installation directory, such as C:\Jts\dieygxwcv. The file names follow the format "Xxx.audit.xml", where "Xxx" is a 3-character abbreviation for the day of the week. Each day that your TWS is run, even briefly, the audit file from 7 days ago is overwritten. That means you have until T+6 to view it, print it, rename it (e.g., with the actual date, not just day of the week) or archive it. To view the latest audit, choose View - Audit Trail - Expanded or Condensed. To view a previous audit, open in a browser... a little awkward, but adequate. Alternatively, rename today's audit, then rename the previous audit of interest to today's, then View - Audit Trail - ..., as usual. In addition, I always capture and save a screenshot of each day's "View - Executions" screen as a .JPG file.
Thanx! This information is excellent. I had spoken with multiple IB staff on the trading desk and on the TWS technical team and there was no mention of this automatically created audit file. ("Create Audit Trail" checked is the TWS default). I asked in for this information in several different ways.... I now have the information required. BTW, may I ask how you discovered this feature in TWS? I have not been able to go through the manual much yet... thx again
Cool... any time. Actually, don't remember how I discovered this feature. Maybe saw it while working my way through TWS online documentation, when I was new to IB... or while playing with the menus... or maybe it was even mentioned on an online forum such as this one. You'll want to read (or at least skim over) the online manual at some point... you'll be glad you did.
Hello, This has sort of come to be a general IB/FX question thread so I will ask this hear, if it is innapropriate then please let me know and I will delete and move. My question is, what FX trading can I really do? I have all the IDEAL PRO pairs on a tab in my TWS but only the eur/usd is open. All the others have a 'C' next to them which as I understand it means, they are closed. It has been like this all day long for me (roughly the past 13 hours). What's the deal? Many thanks in advance. MK
The "C" stands for closing price. For FX we don't supply a last trade. if there is a bid/ask showing, you can trade it.