I currently am a customer of IB and downloaded the Ninja Trader Demo with Zen-Fire and love NT. All I ever hear is how great Zen-Fire is, that said does anyone here use NT with IB and how is it? If you have problems please elaborate.
I use NT with IB and it works OK...however you can not get historical tick data updates..I had to write a system using IB's API to collect historical tick data.
I use NT with IB, but for charting only. I use Buttontrader for order entries. NT works very well for me. I just tried out a couple of new instruments to see how well it backfills. I don't know what the limits are, but for ES on Globex it backfilled 50 days of 1 minute data, and the same for NZDUSD forex. It's only connected to IB, so I can only assume that's where it gets all of its backfill data from. This is in stark contrast to my experience with Multicharts, which seemed to have trouble backfilling the same day's data.
I made today a confrontation between 4 feeds: DTN.IQ, IB, ZEN and PhotonTrader (TT?) I looked only, how fast price changes were trasmitted. And surprise, surprise, IB was mostly the fastest. DTN was the slowest (esp. on EUREX). IB does not send every tick (but also Photon does not it seems ) but the important thing, the changes in price are faster on your charts.... Looking at ticks, ZEN is without doubt the best.
ZEN is faster, and cleaner than IB, TT and TradeStation hands down. Data latency caused by your own internet is also a variable. e s
ZEN isnt faster, ZEN sends all ticks, but IB is often faster trasmitting price changes. My distance to IB and ZEN is the same, so when i can see differences in Price chages (sometimes 0,5 to 1 sec) then that has nothing to do with good or bad Internet conections. Only because on ZEN you cant read the numbers on Level II or on Times&Sales, means that its faster. Check it exactly as i did, and you will see, I am right. I was on the way to change to ZEN because of the hype in different trading rooms, but now i am happy with IB.