I think Schwab would be foolish to destroy it. TOS has kicked Street Smart's ass for years now. And I've given Schwab that feedback for a long time.
I was literally just exchanging emails with TDA support and they told me about this. I just created an account. I had previously inquired about a trading API a couple years ago and while they had one, they were not opening it up to their retail traders, just high account balance individuals and development partners (probably Ninja Trader and folks like that). Anyway, yes, thanks for the reference! Happy day!
I hope you are right but its always hard to predict what the corp bureaucrats might decide. From time to time they make bad business decisions too.
I figure it's a technical security issue or probably something the coders didn't think of previously. I do agree that your suggestion should be made possible.
Agreed. One never knows. I had very mixed feelings when the merger was announced. I like the commission price war that those two were having, frankly. Schwab was good and pushing prices down and TOS was a better trading platform. I have accounts at both. Schwab's web interface is, IMO, better that TDA's. But TOS is a far better active trading platform than Street Smart. As long as I wasn't getting gouged on commissions for either one, it all worked out.
I think that they think that it's a security issue. Surely, knowing about multiple logins is a good thing. But there are ways to control that (e.g., you could have the user set a number of simultaneous logins via the interface and then subject that to multi-factor authentication and whatnot). Also, just having multi-factor authentication by itself is probably enough. If your auth is well-designed and strong, then you shouldn't actually care about numbers of connections as a matter of authentication. There might be load implications, for instance, but TDA and Schwab have no trouble with me being logged in on my mobile, the web, and TOS.
Not everyone wants to use two factor auth. Myself included. I keep two separate accounts, 2FA with banking and no 2FA without banking but with data, used for API trading. So forcing everyone to use 2FA might suit you but many many others would be extremely unhappy with that.
Yep, fair enough. My point was just that IB's limitation doesn't pass the sniff test if they're doing it for security reasons. There are ways to make it secure. Whether those ways would work for any individual is another question.
If Schwab stays true to form they will kill the API upon full integration. Which will be a while even if the deal get quick approval.