(Preface: From a day trader's perspective) I've been trading with IB for two months now. I don't really care about the about getting the NAZ COMP from IB, as I get this from another source. However, what I do need are reliable quotes for the stocks I'm trading. def mentioned that IB is not in the quotes business: "IB is not in the business of being a quote provider." Woah! While I get data from other sources to chart, I need IB data to quickly trade with TWS. In the Market Data lines, you click on bid/ask prices in order to execute sell/buy orders--the displayed price is 'copied' to the Order Management line, ready to be sent to the market after clicking on "Transmit". What's my point? If you want to trade intra-day with this platform, you need reliable, instantaneous quotes. IB not in the quotes business? --how could you trade without them? You could with another provider feeding TWS, but that's not an option, is it? So how can a touted active-trader brokerage like IB say they're not in the quotes business? I bring this up because I have been experiencing too many days of delayed and/or crossed (bid higher than ask) quotes. This SCREWS me when trying to enter or exit a trade in a timely fashion, as I have to look to other quote sources on my monitors and then MANUALLY change the the price in TWS to trade. To IB's credit, executions are blazing, but the fuel that feeds the engine needs an octane boost in my opinion.... Is anyone else experiencing what I've described, or am I an isolated case. If it's just me, I'll reinstall IB and Java and get back with a follow-up.
take my words and twist them.... IB of course cares about supplying live quotes as fast as anyone in the business. We wouldn't be doing the volumes we do if our data was poor. Crossed quotes could come from an ECN or an exchange. If you think there is a delay coming from the IB side with your quotes, send a mail to the help desk who can forward complaints to the appropriate people. What I meant by the data business remark is that we have not supplied charts, T&S etc. BTW, if you think your overall update speed is slow, make sure you set nodraw with the Java.
def, can you clarify what that means? sorry to ask a seemingly easy question, but i looked in JAVA and then in TWS, and can't find anything like that. thanks...
sorry, shouldn't have been nodraw but direct draw. This is from an earlier post: .... it may help with speed/java problems that may arise on some video cards whose drivers create conflicts... Disable Direct Draw for the standalone TWS. (instructions below) Upgrade to the latest production version of Java Runtime. (1.4.1_03 .... I would not recommend the Beta 1.4.2 at this time) Upgrade to the latest video drivers for your hardware. To disable Directdraw for the Standalone TWS. To do this, right click on the Trader Workstation 4.0 icon and choose "Properties". Then click on the "Shortcut" tab. In the "Target" field add the following line before the -jar -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true So that the entire line looks something like this... (assuming that you have java 1.4.1_02 installed) (DO NOT CHANGE THE J2RE REFERENCE.. JUST ADD THE ABOVE LINE IN THE APPROPRIATE LOCATION IN THE STRING THAT ALREADY EXISTS ON YOUR MACHINE) "C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4.1_02\bin\javaw.exe" -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -jar C:\JTS\jts.jar C:\JTS
Re: def java fix Is this something most clients should do? Seems like quotes in tws really getting sluggish these days. Time for more servers IB?
I'm passing your comment along to make sure this gets immediately addressed. If there is a server, program, pipe, switch, etc delaying quotes, it normally will recieve urgent attention. I think the turning off the directd draw has helped people with sluggish java performance. If everything besides quotes seems fine, then it probably will not make a difference.
Thanks def. Every other time I've seen this slowness IB typically does some kind of upgrade shortly after, and quotes get snappy again.