Has anyone used/tested the new ActiveX version of IB's tws for Excel? I've used the DDE version for some time and was wondering if I should consider switching over to the ActiveX version. I'm not very techy, so I'd appreciate any input from anyone who's compared the two. Is the ActiveX version more stable? Is it faster? Does it have more features? Thanks for any help!
I reopen this thread as I have the exact same question asked above. Why choose excel active X over DDE? Thanks
Well you are replying to an old thread. It has been out for years now, so it is not exactly new, but it should be more reliable and faster in all respects.
This seems like an interesting thread to bump. I have recently decided to move a lot of my trading to excel environment and would appreciate any inputs on different excel technologies that IB supports (DDE vs ActiveX). Especially, stability, performance, number of tickers that can simultaneously get data without any effect on performance etc. Thanks.
Use the ActiveX version if you can. That is their advice. The DDE version is only kept around at all because there are a few situations relating to networking or Windows/Excel versions where the ActiveX version cannot be used.
Alright thanks again for advice. Do you know or have a link at hand which gives situations under which IB recommends to use DDE instead of ActiveX? You responded both on marketcetera thread as well as here and you shared your experiences with both of them. It is clear you have already been through this exercise that I am undergoing currently. I am getting curious which technology and software do you use for your research and execution and what kind of products/time-frame do you trade - so that I can map your choice of software/technology against the product/time-frame that you trade. Thanks.
I cannot find any IB links on DDE/ActiveX right now that clarify this. If you open a ticket, maybe they would clarify. I am not using IB at the moment (though I may come back for trading stocks at least later) but am using CTS/T4 which has a nice API for C# and also some Excel capabilities. I am using a combination of my own C# and R code. I was using ActiveQuant after looking at all of the frameworks, but eventually gave up it also for now because I am doing a lot of futures options and none of them support options trading decently.
IIRC, DDE is aged and slow. Might even be obsolete on some platforms. FIX is the standard, which would use a FIX engine -- there was one that I believe was DDE for excel -- I downloaded a demo years ago and I don't recall it ever working. Disclaimer: I didn't realize this was an IB thread (I checked last post first) -- I thought it was the excel thread I posted on a few days ago. Still, DDE is old, was old 5 years ago.