Hi Fullautotrading. I created an account as a result of this thread. A friend and I are doing automated trading as well and frustrated as hell with all the disconnection (and worse, the requirement to manually login) issues with IB Gateway as we use this together with the Ninjatrader 8 platform. Customer service at IB has been virtually no help. Currently using version 2.60 as this was suggested by Ninja tech support as the best version to use with NT8. We are having the same issue. No matter what version we use, continue to get disconnected and asked to manually log-in. Are you using your own software now and not using IB gateway any longer? Stuck using IB Gateway as a bridge between the automated strategy on NT8 and the IB account. Considering switching brokers due to all the unresolved technical issues.
Hello NGtrader, Happy to hear that you started trading. I am still using my platform with IB gateway for my activity with investors. I must say that after so many times I have been telling them not to put any prompt coming from the Gateway the situation has generally improved (even with some periodic reappearance of prompts). However, in the last few days I also noticed the appearance of a few prompts asking a confirmation to "relogin". (I can still live with that, since I anyway supervise closely the activity.) Of course, as you noted, that is annoying and frustrating like it gets, and actually makes mad someone who has spent many years perfecting an automatic system. However, at this point I do not know what to do anymore with them. I have tried with both adulation and insults (I even called them monkeys and got a call from a big shot, from Chicago I think). But probably they periodically "hire" some new programmer who has a brilliant idea to add a prompt again. I know, it's frustrating. We may be able to beat the mkt (sometimes), but there is no way to overcome the invincible ignorance... I will say it once again. The Gateway must not make any prompt under any circumstance. For any communication, please use the API. The users of the gateway are programmers and other software, not anyone staring at idiotic blocking prompts. Prompts defeat the very purpose of the Gateway. It' like making a Ferrari and when you push the accelerator, instead of just roaring and explode ahead, it stops and asks you: "Hello, are you really sure you want to accelerate ?". Look you are driving a real car, and not sitting on a PS4. This might cause an increase of your speed in the real world: are you really sure you want to do that?" Please, smart programmer at IB, think about this. Please, go through all the code and when you see anything resembling a prompt, please remove it, or if you really need to say something, say it via API.
@NGtrader and @fullautotrading for what it is worth: I use IB’s Gateway in combination with IBController and use it 24/6. I do not experience the issues both of you describe.
@HobbyTrading does IBController work for any trading platform or does it interact solely with Gateway so it's a non-issue? Is there a particular version of IB Gateway that must be used with it?
IBController is developed to work with IB’s TWS and Gateway. For more information look for this group: ibcalpha@groups.io
I use IB gateway in fully funded and paper trading modes with my own IB wrapper around the C# implementation and never experienced a re-login pop-up window as long as one did not sign into the same account from another machine. The paper trading gateway account pops up an occasional window asking to acknowledge that this is a paper trading account but even ignoring that pop-up does not disable or limit the gateway functionality. So, in summary my advice is to work around stumbling blocks (the re-login in demo mode is not considered a stumbling block in my book) rather than wasting precious time on bickering about all the shortcomings of the api. I could write pages about the horrific code IB has put together and some of the ridiculous workings of the api in general. Issue here is, however, that IB is not gonna fix those because this is how they originally built the api and it would break the entire code base if they wanted to now change things. They tried such with version 9.7x by changing the entire workings of the event/pull engine in the c# version and it caused a lot of issues with backward compatibility. I know it is not great coding what IB has put together but it works with tweaks and careful and proper error handling (especially on disconnects and reconnects) .
IB gateway reconnects now without asking for manual login, but the IB connection in Ninjatrader shows red like there is an issue but we still have the option to disconnect the feed? Really strange, I don't understand this. We disabled the security card feature in IB and that helped stop the manual login request.
Just an update. installed IBC and so far has run over 30 hours without a disconnection issue, never had a login prompt.
I have installed the IB Gateway v.972 and de IBC and the pop-up of re-login still appears. How I can avoid it?