Agreed. I used to get calls from operations at the firm I trade with about odd lots in the OTC mkt. I essentially told him what you said above.....the calls stopped.
I am not sure this is an INET restriction. It could be a new IB policy put into place. Just tried to sell 50 shares of a 100 share NEM position I have in an IB account and the order was denied. For Nasdaq shares, a SMART odd-lot order now routes to BTRADE by default.
it would be nice to hear something from IB about this. all odd orders to nyse are rejected, all odd orders to nasdaq routed to btrade.more-if you place limit order let say to buy 150 shares of XYZX on nasdaq and get fill on 140 on island-remainig 10 will be routed to btrade and you get nothing,regardless of ask price(even if you try to buy remaining 10 ABOVE current ask with plenty of shares available), until someone route to btrade. ridiculous, but IB and btrade must be happy.
i tested some odd lot orders on both NYSE and NASDAQ stocks a few weeks ago and they were all executed nearly instantly at TIMBR - all were under 100 shares.
That was few weeks ago. what really upset me ,that all changes are made without notice or warning or whatever. You can wake up one day-and you out of business, because of those changes. I been working hard for last few months on application, where data come from IB, analyzed and then opens 10-15 small position at same time, where some of them are odd orders on nyse. in recycle bin!
A new set of regulations requiring special supervisory practices for odd lot orders has been put in place. Apparently, traders were/are abusing the NYSE specialists by submitting 10 99-lot orders instead of 1 order for 1000 shares. The specialists complained and there are new rules. IB didn't want to expend effort on adding to regulatory programming which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the business. It was our opinion that more clients will benefit by our efforts to improve our routing and other algorithms than on supervising odd-lot trader practices. So we eliminated opening odd-lots for US markets because if one doesn't trade odd-lots, one is not required to have a compliance team and special programming to analyze these orders. Enough people are complaining about this that we are reconsidering. It is likely we will roll back the change and examine more carefully the way odd lot orders are being used by our clients and then decide whether to re-deploy the odd-lot restriction.
Thanks for the heads up on the switch... not. It has long been the case that IB has prohibited opening odd lots on NYSE stocks (to prohibit odd lot abuse) and through ARCA (because of the extra charges). I don't understand why INET became a target - what does it have to do with the NYSE? To roll out this change with no warning to customers is irresponsible and extremely annoying. How about send an e-mail or a simple bulletin?