IB updates volume only twice a minute. Tape reading? lol

Discussion in 'Interactive Brokers' started by stock777, Dec 14, 2006.

  1. This is really stupid in my opinion, and has been going on for a long time.

    MANY symbols, especially active ones, only update the TOTAL volume twice a minute.

    This means a program like quotetracker, that refuses to use the last size update, (which is pretty much realtime) to print t&s is useless to monitor actual trades.

    I don't think the bandwidth needed to update total volume is enough to justify this problem.
     
  2. CONR

    CONR

    Agreed. I thought it was an IB issue only and not QT. I switched to IQFeed for the data into QT and was still getting YM prints of 1000. QT refuses to make the change in their software, from which I understand wouldn't take much to do.
     
  3. YM futures should be realtime volume. I have not noticed a futures problem
     
  4. my understanding is that IB aggregates (to some extent) the time/sales (prints)

    however, i still find utility in watching the tape, so take that for what it's worth
     
  5. Yes they do , but aggregation on a 2 or 3 second basis is not a big deal (at least to me) .

    A 30 second snapshot of the action (true volume) in stocks is not acceptable.
     
  6. CONR

    CONR

    An IB rep. told me the data was tick by tick but it's not. When I switched to IQ it got better but there was still consolidation. IQ tech support worked With Jerry at QT but he didn't want to make a change. Now that AMTD owns QT, they are supposedly looking into it.
     
  7. The problem I'm talking about is not the tick by tick issue. It's the decision to not update the total volume information but once every 30 seconds, a problem mostly on high volume stocks.

    They seem to send instant updates on low volume ones.

    I don't see how they are saving all that much bandwidth by doing this. You don't want to update on every single trade, so make it a 2 or 3 second window, 30 seconds is way too long.

    It makes everything look like a block trade.