1. 18:00 ET may be dead time for some people (e.g. futures traders), but there are those of us that trade US stocks after-hours, for whom a shutdown at this time would be a show-stopper. 2. Forced daily logoff of an application is not one of the commonly-recognized security measures in the computer security world, in my experience. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing it used for this reason. 3. All exchanges should be excludable from SMART. There are often temporary reasons to want to exclude an exchange, like the data and/or order-handling for a particular route being obviously bad for a time before IB can be notified and disable it. It could also be that I just find the DPM for a particular class/exchange to do a poor job and don't wish to send them my order flow. 4. Please fix the opening time for ARCA (for exchange-listed stocks anyway). It's not 07:15 ET.
2. It seems a fine financial security measure to me. Assume you build an application that slowly trades away. A bug slips into your code, or our code, or we modify how a feature works. As a result of this your application starts bleeding money, albeit slowly. I very much like the fact that you as a trader have to manually login every day to restart/reinitialize your application to trade. If you did not have to, maybe you would not look at the trading results while your automaton trades all your hard earned cash away. 3. The SMART should already be handling both the cases you mentioned automatically. 4. I'll forward the message.
I just upgraded for the new alert feature and were happy to use it, but I think the alert method should be improved. Currently there are only 3 options such as last, double last, double bid/ask. I even do not know whether bid or ask is used if I choose double bid/ask. How about adding at least single bid and single ask options separately? Thanks. ggoom
Quote from IBsoft: 2. ... while your automaton trades all your hard earned cash away... My argument here comes down to "that's my problem". I'm a big boy and will take my lumps if I do something wrong. While I like my trading platforms to not incite me into making blunders, and to help prevent me from making obvious mistakes where possible, I don't need it to be my mommy Personally, I've never had enough confidence in a strategy or platform to run a system without watching it. 3. The SMART should already be handling both the cases you mentioned automatically. Only if IB knows about the problem. This sometimes can take an extended period of time, during which it would be nice to be able to handle it myself. (O.T. to the writers of the BBS software used on ET: It sure would be nice if it could handle multi-level attributions, just like we were somehow able to do with nothing more than '>' at our disposal in the dark ages )
2. I wish everyone took the responsibility for their actions the way you seem to. 3. Some examples of what the system does: - The market data is being constantly checked for staleness. The stale pieces are automatically hidden from the smart router. - When an exchange stops acking orders, we re-route your orders elsewhere and take over your over-execution risk. If you think the system is doing a poor job, I would prefer if you could PM me specifics next time it happens. We will analyze them and if an improvement, needs to be made, we will do it.
This is one of the reasons why I suggested IB should allow you to set your account margins at a limit above their own, so you can limit maximum losses to a percentage of your total account value. I have another account with a futures broker that allows me to set maximum contract limits for my account, that's why I'm suprised IB don't offer this level of control and protection to their customers. It just seems sensible and prudent to me. Runningbear
Perhaps IB could compute and make available a near real-time put-call ratio. Good ahead - embarrass me and tell me IB already has it as ..... Jack