If you had the IB workstation you would see that it is set up to place trades off the bid and ask. Manually keying in the price is so much slower. If the prices aren't timely, you can lose a lot by chasing with a market order, or by missing a fill (market has moved but you aren't filled).
1. If you use BEST - then your order is routed based on IB's quote 2. It is much easier to look at "just" your TWS then to have to check your quote vendor on another monitor 3. If you are an active trader then you could have 1,000 quotes (options/equities) in each of your TWS's. You will have a hard time finding a quote via your vendor fast enough to trade off of. 4. When you click on the bid/ask - a price is automatically inserted in your order line (if it is incorrect then it will cost you time to adjust the price) I'm sure there are many more reasons..............
The quotes in my IB futures account have been lagging and freezing since last Thursday. It started while I was using the stand alone version 754. Yesterday, I upgraded to 756. Not much better. Today, I downloaded the newest version 757 and experienced the same problems. The spread on the S&P Emini was .75 or greater at times. Rebooting didn't help for more than a minute. IB Customer Service suggested it is a Java problem. Their advice was to uninstall Java and reinstall it. Also, they suggested using Java 1.31._02 instead of the newer 1.4.0 version.
Most of my orders on NYSE stocks are being rejected today. The orders go green and then go red. I can not buy at any price. I had to place my orders through another broker. Catoosa
TWS standalone disconnected and I can not log back on. IB is having their problems today! Makes you wonder if IB's server base is falling behind their customer base as was the case with Datek in the past. Catoosa
I have been okay today so far. I did have problems with my Quicken quotes Live for just a minute though. Good luck.
No problems today with IB. Are you sure it isn't your internet connection? Using futures acct here btw, so if you are using stock acct it might be a different story.
The problem was with stock order routing. Took IB all morning to get the problem corrected; But, all is now working as it should. Catoosa: