I keep hearing that IB offers only a "snapshot" as opposed to an actual tick-by-tick feed. Is this true? Anybody know?
You get about 4 snapshots per second. Unless you are doing some very fine scalping, that's more than enough precision.
Your wording of the question suggests you probably dont know much about data feed structure. why not begin by using the search feature here. There is and has in the past been good discussion on this. Search words like "snapshot", "tick data", IB data",... will get you into understanding whats going on. ... rj