That's interesting what you say abt the clearers servers getting blocked up. Do you trade stocks? I've never had that issue with futures at IB. Only issue is ever seem to have is that the charts will sometimes seem to miss a beat when eco numbers released or massive news comes out. I always wondered if that was simply due to a gap given the jump in price or overload on the charting system.
i trade futures (mainly fixed income), no stocks. have changed the clearer and will see how things work out there in the new year...
you have a 100 meg line to your home or office? The cost of this would be in the tens of thousands if you aren't in NYC or co-located with your broker. During the flash crash I saw a floor of about 75 guys pull a max of 120mb/sec (on sterling & lightspeed) and my dedicated lines only pulled a max of 17mb/sec. I work with a few firms with guys on the NYSE floor - they still hang on to the old T3 lines and do fine. Your issue is neither bandwidth or connectivity - your data provider can't puke out quotes fast enough.
these times are crazy - anything > 10ms is slow today. You can send your grandma an e-card from NYC to LA faster than most of you can place orders. Think of your world as being separated into three different parts: #1 a data provider #2 an execution engine (or front end) #3 clearing firm The vast majority of traders get data from, execute at and clear at the same place - a self-clearing BD like Etrade, Scottrade, etc. The vast majority of guys with a "goldman account" just clear GSEC (note difference between GS&CO vs. GSEC). They might have a GSEC acct but they aren't invincible - they still need to go out and buy data from Activ, IQfeed, NxCore, Bloomberg, etc. but there is zero advantage to a clearing firm. Buy data - it can be fast, medium or slow execute - your platform can be ok, crappy or shitty (they are all terrible) (by this i mean sterling, etrade, lightspeed, scottrade, Redi, IB, etc. - all of their front ends that you stare at daily) send orders - to your clearing firm - GSEC, Etrade, IB, scottrade, TD, etc. insert shady prop firm here.... you buy data you feed that data into a screen you pay to trade - fees... prop or not we all pay you pay fees to a clearing firm that executes your trades trading 101. it takes 20ms for a message to pass from your eyeball to your fingertip. if i were to stand in front of you and shoot a rubber band at your eyeball it would take your body 20ms to realize that I just let go and you should probably blink. ping & latency are relative - but should not be overlooked. guys on the west coast can hang with guys in NYC if they are pushing buttons. if you are automated and need to cancel an order that is a different story.
Correct but by today's standards you are trading on historical data when you start to get up over 50ms. Anything greater than 25ms and prices can really change before it hits your screen. All this means is that you are looking at old data and trying to make decisions on prints that already happened.