Def, a while ago you answered a complaint by hsanson about the excruciating slowness/delays of INCA orders to go live and to cancel as being a problem with INCA and not IB. That's definitely not the case. Other broker's INCA links are instantaneous. As a matter of fact with IB it is several orders of magnitude faster to indirectly hit an INCA quote by going through REDI than to hit it directly. This makes INCA almost useless for momentum scalping which is very unfortunate considering that it is the most liquid ECN. To IB's credit I have to add that the responsiveness of IB's INCA connection has improved somewhat recently. However, it is still sub-standard. Dave
I remember the day when [IB]Kristian announced us (traders that are present at Othernet's #Interactivebrokers IRC Chatroom) that INCA's speed has been upgraded. I immediately tested INCA's "go live" speed by placing an order on INCA to bid a stock, it took around 5-6 seconds to "go live". As this it a 50% improvement as before, INCA used to go live in 10+ seconds. For real trading purposes, this INCA's speed can't beat other EDAT brokers using INCA and even though IB is fast, it is sometimes no fast enough to compete in the "pure speed" daytrading arena. For example, ARCA always takes at least 4 seconds to go live, sometimes even more. ISLD is at least very speedy in IB's Platform, as it takes 1-2 seconds most of the time, but sometimes takes more too. Forget Best Exection, it is a toy. What I really would like implemented on IB's trading platform is an "ECN ONLY" auto routing execution, much the same as Cybercorp's. For example choosing this route I can hit "ANY" ECN available on Level 2 without having to select that specific ECN's route on IB's Platform. ARCA & REDI routes do this, but they use SELECTNET to preference a MM when no ECN is available and that really tends to slow things down when you need "ECN speed" execution. hsanson
Hsanson, even if IB did provide a version of BE that is limited to ECNs it would be rendered practically useless by the slowness of their links to INCA and ARCA. Actually ARCA does provide an ECN only routing option called ARCA NOW. It should be easy and require very little effort on IB's part to make this available by adding an additional order route for ARCA that designates orders as type ARCA NOW. Maybe we can get Def on the case. Dave
give me a few days to enquire into the last three posts. I've placed INCA orders overnight w/o delay. However, I rarely deal with the US markets during normal trading hours and will need to discuss this with others.
Hsanson and dlincke very good idea with the ECN only or ARCA now option. def thanx for Your to help. best of luck eli
Has anyone else noticed that Island orders don't seem to be showing up on Level 2 as they should? It seems like an intermittent thing. My orders that are better than the current inside ask usually show up (my price and my size.) But my orders bettering the inside bid don't seem to show up very often. This makes it much harder to get a fill. On my other platform there's an option to have your Island orders be `non-display'. IB doesn't let you set that flag. Sounds like they've left it floating or something. Richard
got a reply regarding INCA. was told that they are doing a couple of things to speed up the INCA feed. Part of it may be done by now. The other part will be another increase in the line speed which has been ordered.
[Does someone know the IB email address for feedback about JTWS? I want to send the following comments to IB] I opened an account at IB last month and have now done about 600 trades. Overall and I am very pleased with the execution quality and the performance of the JTWS. The useability of JTWS could use some improvement. Here are my initial reactions after using it for a few weeks. *) It is a pain to add a ticker, esp. a stock. You have to go through two dialogs first type in symbol name, then select order route.. I would like to see a TextField at the top where you can just type in a bunch of stocks like "SUNW CSCO ORCL AMAT QCOM" and have JTWS add each one automatically with a default route. *) The Route should not be part of the 'Contract' I trade many stocks during the day, and I don't have enough space to have separate lines for each symbol for each route. My choice of route depends on market conditions and the liquidity of each stock. If the market is moving very fast, I will use ISLAND for liquid stocks, otherwise I will use BEST or REDI. I would like the ability to change the route for all contracts on a page so I can quickly change routing based on market conditions. If Route is made separate from the symbol, then you could have a default route in the Settings->Order screen. *) Customization of Order Entry Pages - I would like more control over the displayed columns for a contract. In particular, I don't want to see the bid size and ask size. I would replace them with the info described below. - For 'Contract', I would to just see the symbol. It is hard to read "SUNW S USD ISLAND NMS". - I would like to see my open position on this contract # shares + avg price. Having to check the 'Account Page' takes too much time; this information should be integrated on the entry page just like the *excellent* order status updates the 'Quantity' and 'Status' columns as the order is filled. - I would like to see *my* realtime gain (loss) on my open position in this contract, rather than the contract 'Change' for the day. - BUG: If I try to rearrange the 'Status' column, I noticed the original column location still has the status color changes. - There needs to be an option to preload the quantity size with the size of your open position in that contract instead of always using the default order size. If I am long 1000 shares, and create a sell market/limit ticket for the contract, it should show 1000 shares by default. If I create a buy ticket, it should just use the default order size, since I am adding to the position. One situation where this would help is when I try to sell limit 500 shares and get partially filled so I have 137 shares remaining. I want to quickly sell the rest at a slightly lower price, but it takes time because I havce to manually enter the 137 shares. - I would like to change the behaviors when you click the bid or click the ask. It currently defaults to Buy at Ask, Sell at Bid, but usually I am trying to do the opposite. *) I would like a more sophisticated default order size. Right now you can set it to a fixed amount like 200 shares. However, the number of shares I trade depends on the price and volatility of the security. The best solution would be to allow individual defaults per symbol/contract. An alternative to default order size would be to specify the trade $ size e.g. 20,000 and have the computer calculate the #of shares rounded to nearest 100. So, I want to risk $20k per trade, and then for a $50 stock, I should trade 400 shares. *) I hate confirmation dialogs. Please have an option to turn these off. If I use your software 6-8 hours per day, I am not going to accidentally select Order->Cancel Page, but JTWS pops up a confirmation "Are you sure you want to cancel all the orders on this page? Yes No" Having to click Yes is a distraction and costs me time. Also, it is much too difficult to delete contracts on a page. If I hit 'Cancel' on a contract, it should delete the row for the Contract plus any order rows that had been created. Instead, it pops up a message saying I can't delete the contract since there are orders. When you have 10 orders for a contract it is pain to cancel each one and then cancel the symbol. *) VERY ANNOYING - When I am executing many orders all at once, they orders starts automatically disappearing after they are executed. The problem is that if I am selecting a row or editing a quantity while this happens, the selection shifts when the other row is deleted. This causes my edit to get interrupted, and is very distracting! I would prefer for orders to not dissappear automatically and instead have a button to clean up these orders when I am ready to. *) On the Account Page, I want to see the realtime gain (loss) on my open positions. *) From the Account Page, there should be a way to close all open positions using a specified route, or at least fill a new order page with all of the positions. This is very important because if there is a market changing event where you need to get our of your positions quickly, it is very difficult to do with JTWS. I have the following comments on execution: *) Please add an ECN Only Route. Your BEST execution route does not work for fast stocks because it prefers MMs SNET way too much...*) The ECN Only Route should not include ECNs which may SNET a MM.
Fleance: 600 trades in 1 month. Seems you are a very active trader indeed. A lot of f IB's JTWS users have been requesting the features you mentioned in your post. In fact we have been doing this for months. Seems as if IB's programming department doesnt really grasp the concept of interface design & efficiency. I welcome you to visit IB's customer supported IRC chatroom during trading hours, maybe you can hear comments from IB's useres in realtime. The channel is: #interactivebrokers IRC server: Othernet We are there to share experiences, problems and be notified of IB's problems in realtime during trading hours. Also, you can read IB users posting daily comments at this address: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/subject.gsp?subjectid=32122 hsanson
fleance, i have forwarded your remarks directly to the head of operations. Thanks for the detailed list. hsanson, IB has taken a number of suggestions from end users and has implemented many of them (read many of the posts on this board). There is an enormous disparity between the types of clients of IB (i.e. < 1 trade per month to many thousand trades per month) and while it is certainly the aim, it is impossible to please everyone. Suggestions are definately listened to and priorities are assigned. Also, not every change is cosmetic. There is so much going on behind the scences aimed towards improving/maintaining the order routing, back office, etc that occupies programming time. I do my best to report to the appropriate people constructive comments/suggestions. I can assure you that the comments are looked at the highest levels. Thus your comments about design and efficiency in my opinion are totally off base.