I understand that part..... Now for the fun part. getting my app to work with the FIX gateway... and so on....
how getting the IB Fix gateway to load to begin with? this command gets me nowhere: <b>java -Xmx128M -cp gwclient.jar ibgateway.GWClient</b>.
1. By using FIX you'll gain in the long term, since switching between brokers would be as simple as tuning up some tags. 2. Using FIX is almost "must" for ATS. 2. Using FIX is almost always faster than using API on the client side. 3. IB does provide market data over FIX. 4. IB web page claims they can send "out-of-band" messages over FIX containing various account information, but it needs to be checked, since their FIX guide says nothing about it. One more note: TWS API full of bugs and IB market data sucks... Better to get the feed elsewhere. Currently, I'm trying to get a test FIX connection to IB to test my ATS... I was using quickfix to build the gateway and it was a piece of cake...
I hope it's free I've submittet request for a test connection, and IB repr said it was possible, but nobody contacted me so far... I'll ping IB on Monday...
A serious trading firm doing 1000s of trades/day... With capital into 7 figures and up... Would use FIX to completely replace the very limited TWS platform... With a proprietary platform that is custom designed... To trade whatever specialized niche that firm is trading... Which is infinitely superior to a general purpose platform like TWS. I'm in the middle of doing this. A firm such as this... Would never be using the crappy free IB market data or any cheap data. There is a REASON why 100,000s of Thomson, Reuters, and Bloomberg... Quote terminals and data feeds are installed... And used by Pros... Leaving amateurs trying to compete with inferior tools. As for account balances... Your custom, largely automated platform that trades through FIX... Would communicate in real-time with a secondary TWS platform... Big deal. Frankly... Your custom platform would be sophisticated enough... To maintain account balances equivalent to TWS... That's the easy part.
About account balances... My ATS' position manager calculates all necessary numbers just to avoid all unnecessary dependencies... Less dependencies, more freedom...