Well, this is just another customer complaint among many which again shows how IB is an inferior Broker. Thanks to honest Traders who are willing to speak the truth: jose.montana; dhpar; deviltrader; cstfx; QuantPlus; newbunch; ZZ; Bitstream; Daal; originalskunk; trada101; Fly7788; squall. New Traders: be very careful about putting your $ with IB: cheap commissions = cheap charts, cheap execution platform, very poor customer service, etc., etc., etc. Watch out for shills of IB who regularly pipe up in defense of incompetence, unreliability, and poor customer service. All we hear from IB over an over again are excuses as to why things are not properly working. However, this time IB admits that they won't even consider enhancing their cruddy Time and Sales data. Geeez, when, if ever, will IB get its' act together? I hope these comments from honest traders like those mentioned above helps NEWTimers just starting out pursing their trading careers. Tom
I've have asked IB for real time Time & Sales a dozen times this year, and as many times the two years before that. What amazes me, is that T&S was a basic tool so many years ago. But IB completely ignored it. Can somebody tell me, why did IB invest thousands (more?) of man hours developing charting when there were already so many advanced charting packages already in existence? Why couldn't they stick to displaying basic trading data? IB has the data, and they even have the display format complete in their historic T&S display. Its a baby step to make the T&S real time. The only remotely credible answer I got was concerns about server loading with real time T&S. But when I open a real time T&S window (in another program) I don't care about the past, so there is no extra server capacity involved. I just do not know why they will not provide this basic tool.
The system that IB uses sends a "sample" of what is happening at the instant it sends it. They use a time-slice technique and send a new packet of data (of maximum size) about 3 to 4 times a second. Thus, the price you see is current the instant it is transmitted. With this method they know the maximum server load per customer. If IB were to send every sale as it occurred the would have no way of knowing how much data they needed to transmit per symbol and thus would need huge server capacity and substantial additional bandwidth to the internet backbone. Does your other service keep up when there is a Fed announcement? It's a trade-off. Obviously they decided to go with a fixed data rate. Jack
sure their data might be that way but it wont kill them to make the window scroll it self and update automatically