How realistic is the papertrader? It did not work well at all this week. I had one trade that shorted when I clearly entered buy. I had trades that did not show up in the execution window. The trade that sold instead of buy, is still on the platform, after I tried numerous attempts to liquidate today both limit and market orders. Today when I opened the platform this stock still shows in the portfolio but is not on the pending tab. Today I placed 6 more stock trades in which 3 of them went up but no fill on any of them after bouncing around back and forth through my limit price. and still could not get out of my bogus short trade after chasing it with limit orders and then a market order. Is this typical with a simulator platform? or am I to expect this in real time? What kind of a realtime fill should I expect to get on a stock with 100K volumn? and when you attatch a stop, it doesn.t fill unless you are filled on you limit buy first right? I never had any problem trading the futures realtime, but a lot of the stocks I scan for are lower volumn. 100k usually, and are much slower. Even though there is no one on the other side of the trade here, any input?
Do you mean the IB PaperTrader Account, or the TWS Demo? You have to have a regular IB account to get the paper account. Then it gives you $100K (resettable) to use. You can trade with the real TWS, or the IB WebTrader on the paper account. If you mean the TWS Demo, then you get $50K (I think, been a while) and kind of bogus delayed data. I've seen the Demo do funky things, but I used the PaperTrader for about 6 months testing new futures systems. It worked fine for me. Regards. W.
Yes, I mean the Ib papertrader account is what I have. They start you with US. 1,000,000. But like I said, it was very rough this week as I mentioned. Maybe I have a virus or something. I am having other problems with the computer also so I am going to reformat tomorrow and start again, I will post again if it doesn't solve. Thanks John
I also experienced similar issues when i tried it out about 4 or 5 months ago..also the opening trade was not really being simulated properly at that time..i had high hopes initially but was a little disappointed..would be interested in hearing more positive experiences from more recent users that find it useful.
I'm having similar problems. Some market orders execute, some do not. I've been using for months and it's always been a little flaky, but this is the first time I've had problems so severe as to render the paper trade account virtually useless.
Yes, I am convinced that it is for nothing but learning the bells and whistles. I just placed about (overexcessive)14 more setups on the platform and all of them triggered long wheather it hit my price or not. It really doesn't matter except it makes you think twice about placing realtime trades on their platform!
It might be better for testing your API software than anything else. It would be a major tool in system development if it worked well. Thanks for the heads' ups.
I have a live account with IB for 4 years. recently IB implemented that papertrading account can only be launched after live TWS launched. there after I am having all sort of problems with papertrading account. sometimes I see all question marks even though live account is launched with another instance of TWS. Conclusion : IB platform is worst in the industry, however their comm price/wiring cost/ makes me stick with them.... I only trade TWS live account but practice TOS papertrading which in my opinion TD-Ameritrade/TOS is far better platform than TWS.
I'm with TOS-->TD right now, and I agree it's a much better platform than IB's TWS. I tried the DEMO, and if it's similar to the current TWS version, it's definitely turning people away. It's free, so you're getting what you pay for. I am thinking of changing to esignal, which can be integrated with IB. Something to think about. Solid platform and great broker.
If you are running this setup on an older computer, especially a single core CPU, these kinds of problems are likely. If you are looking for an excuse to upgrade your system then you have one! With a quad core system one cpu would be dedicated to the first TWS, the second to the other TWS and you still have two cpu's standing by for all the network and disk handling. When I upgraded it made a world of difference. Paper trader still sucks but a lot of other problems went away.