IB HK is generally responsive. Once they gave me wrong information by chat and in 5 minutes they called me to correct it. I also have good experiences with the API people, they seem to genuinely want to help and can delve into complicated problems, that's not easy.
This has happened to me on the micro contracts but never on the full size contracts. I wonder what it is as well.
Well. I don't enjoy contacting or chatting with helpdesk. I'll let other IB users contact the helpdesk. and I will monitor if the problem still persist.
I and a (local) trading buddy had decade-old trading settings 'go bad' a month or two ago, with one of the new "steady" releases. Never nailed down the what or why of it, but for a day or two, it was frightening. (Not because it was not easy to pick up and fix, but because it was so unexpected, regarding something that had just *never* been an issue.) I would advise that as soon as you see a TWS problem like that, save a copy of your settings with a key: RTHsettings_Nov13_tradeissue or some such, so it's there to ship to IB immediately.
No offense but that's completely unprofessional. No-one contacts support because they enjoy it. I imagine the amounts you're trading are so small that you just don't care. Otherwise the unease of contacting support is nothing compared to the pain of losing significant money.
I have quite a few trading accounts to overcome or rather to avoid such problems. anyway, when I am in better mood, I will contact IB helpdesk with all the relevant details.
No offense but that's a completely unprofessional comment -- equating account size with lost dollars? If you gave it 30 seconds more thought, you'd realize that regardless of account size, what matters is the *impact* on dollars, not the starting point. IB's TWS has plenty of annoyances little and big which, were someone troublingly anal enough to complain, document, email, phone, text, take screen shots, take names and phone numbers, complain some more..... could eat up a career. You could eat up a career. (Or, you could recognize that your time is better spent on this DOM over here, or that chart over there, or in that article over on seeking-alpha that you'd gotten the notice of.......) A "professional" chooses their battles, weighs their time like a..... *professional*. I know you agree, d08. Just pointing it out.
I never said the losses were in absolute terms, where did you get that from? I don't agree at all. I don't jump onto the next topic until I feel I'm on solid ground with the previous. To have everything open at once will eat away your attention span and will make you perform worse. It's actually very important to follow-up with a broker on issues like this, instead of wasting time complaining on a public forum because if you don't, it will just keep repeating time after time. You need to know why and how it happened, so you can avoid it. If I never talked with IB on their issues and bugs, I can't imagine where I'd be now. I've solved/understood something like 10-15 issues with IB by communicating with them, much of the info is not available online, so I would have been in total darkness. If I didn't, I'd sit here losing money as the problems keep repeating and I'm reading Seeking Alpha without knowing why (I really don't care about that publication). Also, IB is a company that provides a service. If your internet connection is malfunctioning, do you just sit there waiting and complaining to people or do you contact the company to find a resolution? If it's a clear problem, I imagine everyone here would be on the phone within a few hours.
Exactly why my algos send me a text any time any event happens, I then login to IB to check if all good on broker's side. Annoying, but it is the only way to protect yourself from what ever bug/issue might be out there. I also have the bunch of monitoring tools that alert me if market data connection gets lost.