Last week, I took the opportunity to write IB managment about the stop order problems. Def has posted on another thread that the software patch was going in today or tomorrow. I received this email from IB mgmt this morning regarding the problem. They clearly indicate that there was a problem and that they believe they have fixed it. I have deleted the name and title of the person who responded. I apologize that you experienced difficulties with your stop orders and thank you very much for informing us of your difficulties. Our top programmers, with help from George (with whom you spoke), were able to pinpoint a technical problem, which we believe we have solved. Thank you again for your candor, and please let us know if you experience further difficulties. Regards I cannot test this til next week. If anyone gets a stop order elected on a NASDAQ stock, please let us know how it performs. This is an excellent development and the best we could have hoped for. Kudo's to IB for their repsonse and timely action. Thanks
Today executions of my 3 stop orders were IMMEDIATE once the bisd or ask hit my limit prices ! What a pleasure to be executed this way. Seems that they have fixed the problem and that we can trust IB stop orders now.
This is very good news indeed. I am impressed that IB is truly interested in improving their services (with a little bit of a nudge and prod here and there from us). No one is perfect, but a broker that responds to suggestions and corrects errors is a gem. Fantastic.
This is great news. Were you using "best" on your nasdaq stops? I'm curious which route will be the best. (No pun intended). Also, what price are they executing at? Do they still have to have two prints at the ask or did they change that dumb rule?
Huby, Yes always Best for my stop orders.They were routed to Island,Soes and Instinet. Their algorithm is still the same(two posted ask or bid at or below the limit price) but I don't consider this as a drawback.Just need to adapt.
Great, time to settle stocks at my other brokerage and wire some money over. I see being able to use IB as a potential $2,000 savings per month in commissions.
Def, I've had 4 stops not fill in the last two weeks at IB, all to the sell side. Today I had 200sh of LWIN at a sell stop of $16.47, and the price dropped through without triggering the stop. I went to cancel it and it instantly filled at $16.00 (the current bid)? I was long 300 shares and my stop was for 200 shares. I was wondering if selling part of a position was a problem in the Algorithm? One day I had 2 of 10 not work. My cost has been maybe $400, and is outweighed by my commission savings, so I'm not complaining, but it's a real pain and is hard to rely on. Is there someone I can talk to or work with at ib, so when this happens they can look at what went wrong. Today I did a live chat with customer service and left my stop in place and let the shares ride down so they could diagnose the problem to no avail. Luckily only a $90 live chat for me...They suggested the prices were crossed when I entered the stop, or some other anomaly occurred. I have about 10-20 stops executed per day, so its probably 2-4% of the time they don't work. Thanks for any help. And by the way, it's definitely the Ask that must hit the Sell stop twice and not the Bid to trigger stops. I've confirmed that many times. Not a big deal, but I wish it were the other way around.
dedefia, i'd suggest on the day of the trade to send details of the order help@interactivebrokers.com to the attn of edmond. he is on the hk help desk so the turn around will be a number of hours later but I can ask him to look out for such a mail and study the audit trail and time and sales. perhaps he will catch something or will be able to explain why/what is happening.
def, And by the way, it's definitely the Ask that must hit the Sell stop twice and not the Bid to trigger stops. I've confirmed that many times. Not a big deal, but I wish it were the other way around. I thought everybody went round 'n round on this, and you definitively stated that it was the Bid that had to be hit (twice) on a sell as it should be. And that the explanation on the site was simply worded wrong, but the algorithm was properly set. Doesn't sound like it according to ddefina as stated above?
this was recently posted.... Q. Your website indicates that for NASDAQ and option stop orders, execution of a buy stop is triggered at the bid, and execution of a sell stop is triggered at the offer. Isn't this backwards? A. In previous versions we had buy stops triggered by equal or higher sales and/or offers. On several occasions these stops became active due to erroneously posted sales or, in inactive markets, offers posted several dollars higher than the bids. In some of these cases, we took the trades back and paid for the execution ourselves. In other cases, we let the trades stand and had some very unhappy customers.....