At 1 minute time frame, your concerns are no problem T-Dog. Other than occasional bad tick, which is common to ALL feeds. IB sends the data in sub 1 second bursts, so while you might miss a couple prints, you are very unlikely to miss the prints that make the highs/lows.
The market data delivery system is designed to skip certain updates in order to be able to keep up with fast moving markets even on low bandwidth connections. It refreshes up to 5 times a second. I believe it is sutiable for scalping, probably even more so than the other services out there, exactly because of our willingness to skip the "old" data. (I work for IB; I hope other ET participants will confirm my belief). The High/Low information both on TWS and charts is not affected by our regular tick-data update strategy. The High/Low is separately distributed from the back-end and hence it is based on all the data (even those pieces that were not sent to the TWS as part of the market data stream).
I use IB with Sierra charts. There shouldn't be any problem scalping with IB. May take you a while to get used to using TWS, but other than that, go for it.
I don't agree with this at all. Certainly IB data can be used for scalping. It is fast, but to say the highs / lows are comparable is misleading.
Thank you for your response. However, I am not certain I fully understand your last paragraph. Are you saying that the High, Low and Close on 1-minute charts using IB data will indeed be representative of their "true" values? I do not only refer to past data that may or may not have been adjusted (as noted, I'm not sure what you meant in your last paragraph). I also refer to 1-minutes charts as they are being developed on the screen. Please advise.
Confirmed for Futures. I've never seen IB's High/Low differ from CME's, CBOT's and NYMEX's quotes intraday or end of day. Therefore, I conclude for futures, 1 min bar and up is suitable for day trading.
I appreciate the input. What about the Close for the 1-minute bars? Neither you nor IBsoft has commented on the Close of the 1-minute price bars. Based on your post, it follows that the Close would be representative as well, however, I don't wish to make any unnecessary assumptions. Please advise.
I can only confirm that for CME data. For Nymex and CBOT I assume the close would be the same for 1 min and up. I don't monitor those two exchanges as regularly as CME. Hourly, for those two exchanges, the High/low/close is lock step with IB's data for the same. Data comparisons based on: CME - E mini S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, E mini russel 2000, Euro FX. NYMEX - Crude (WS,QM), Natural Gas (HG,HH,QG) CBOT - Mini Dow.