I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my IB practice accounts stop working at 4:30am. Turns out IB (interactive brokers) has a new policy that you can't use your live account and your practice account at the same time. According to a tech, it's to save computing resources. I received no notice of this change from them. My wifes trades 2 of our IB accounts while I use the practice accounts to test systems. This is really absurd policy, IMHO. The quicker I can test a system, the sooner I can take it live and would probably open another IB account, so they are really hurting themselves with this policy, because they will get fewer commissions from me and others. If you use Interactive Brokers, PLEASE call and complain about this. Maybe the next time they won't institute a stupid policy like this without at least polling their users. Thanks, Lew Lepley
Is that what they call spouse-arithmic trading ... ? So now it's not just the algos we need to worry about ... there are also the merciless wife-bots ...
their current data policy is ridiculous.. everyone is counting nano fucking seconds and IB scaling down to "save" resources. you quotes are freezes every other time already,making me feel that i'm like in 1995...as usual the changes are not documented anywhere. no email or message to existing customers. how fucking hard that is? to send few words about those changes? pathetic...stop the fucking madness with TWS upgrades\updates\new features every week. i told you this long time ago :work on the changes on your side. the goal is speed,execution,routing. instead they keep adding useless shit that eat their own resources and now they trying to save them,by punishing their own customers.
Hey, she is one hell of a trader, better than me! But now, we'll have to go down to one account, so IB is losing commissions due to this stupid restriction.
I noticed this too this week and I spoke to IB about this. Apparently the only solution to the datafeed problem is to create a new user in your account. Therefore you have a new login and password, it can still be yourself and they allow that. However, you will have to pay for the additional data fee. Hope that solves the issue, I think it'll solve mine once my new user gets approved. Hopefully today or tomorrow.
Didn't someone post already that the restriction is that you can only run their demo and live account on the same physical computer. So it can be any computer you have, but once you log in on a pc, you can only run the other acct on that same pc as long as the 1st log-in is still active on it. Kinda dumb anyway.
Must be an Exchange restriction, some of them might not want us using real time data on two PC's unless we are paying for both?
IB did said something like this not so long ago, but i'm personally not buying this..imo they just trying to squeeze few bucks from customers here and there..how to hell exchanges know what account is doing what,how many data lines is used and who is the owners,sub accounts,paper,demo etc? if we are talking about whatever limitations it would be more logical to limit 100 data lines on both,if they are running on same PC. that is. you have 65 data lines on your main account-you have 35 left on your paper account. using all 100 on real account-no data on paper account.
I agree ... this is in the penny wise, pound foolish category. Stopping the practice account while running a live session slows testing down thus slowing the arrival of new revenue for IB. Come on guys, surely this is an oversight by someone who didn't see the consequences of their cost saving.