Hi, I placed a sell stop order on a very liquid stock today and the stock traded below my stop by a few cents for over a minute and a half and my stop was never executed. Has anyone else had this sort of experience with IB? Thanks
Head on over to their chat boards and you will find that stop orders at IB are a known headache. I trade e-minis, and stop orders never seem to work for them. If you are trading a nasdaq stock, then you are running into the same type of problem that traders face on globex. IB is simulating the stop (And not very well). I think they do this because those systems don't accept stop orders natively. Not 100% sure on that. But anyhow, with IB, its best to eyeball your trades and do your own stops manually (IE placing market orders to get out if the market moves against you)
To whom it may concern: What a mess ! www.interactivebrokers.com/discus/messages/3/3557.html?1032377727
I had a sell stop today in the E-minis at 860.50. In the last 5 minutes of trading, I saw prices trade through this level and my stop order just sat there. I sold what I needed to when I realized the stop order wasn't executing (filled at 858.75) and cancelled the order. I'm not a happy camper. It's not the first time it's happened. What good is a stop order if I have to sit there and watch it to see if it executes my order???
IB stops only work during regular market hrs. (i.e. until 4:00 est). That's probably why your stop wasn't executed. FWIW -- had no problems recently with their stops. (My trading, now that's another story...) Hofferino
Hi, I also had a stop completely ignored today. It was for SPY and through the smart routing. I use them frequently and it seems to have been intermittently malfunctioning this week.
I don't know about that. On smart routing for NYSE I saw the price go through my stop during the middle of daylight market hours and I had scramble to cancel the stop and get the limit sell off. I thought it was fluke. I will pay close attention to this and post if it happens again.
Same here. IB doesn't honor stop orders after hours on Globex. It did allow me to place a valid stop order after hours , but it never got executed. In a way, I got my head handed to me
I agree, unfortunately there are times when IB stop orders just don't work. Sometimes they execute a few minutes late. But the funniest thing trading SPY using IB is that every once in a while (like this afternoon) an AMEX bid or ask gets stuck for a few minutes, but of course you cannot hit it since SPY becomes miraculously unavailable at the AMEX in locked or crossed markets. But the top award for ramming your head in your butt and pulling it back out your mouth goes to the CBOE with OEX option orders. You can have a limit order sitting on CBOE for half an hour, it is correctly displayed in the data feed while it is the best bid or offer, then when the market gets there you see several trades print through your order without getting an execution, then the market trades back away from your (still unexecuted) order, ten minutes after that, when you have given up hoping for an execution, you try to cancel your order and it takes another couple of minutes for the cancel confirmation. To be fair I should say that CBOE has actually been quite good with equity options (where there is competition amongst exchanges). The best thing was a few weeks ago when I bought an EK call through the CBOE without any problems, and a few minutes later a guy from IB calls me and tells me the CBOE is giving me a favorable price adjustment on that execution. To this day I have no idea why this happened, but if they want to give away .05, why would I object?