I made two trades late this afternoon both with bracketed (OCO) orders while things were slow for the sole purpose of testing and then reporting the failure of the remaining legs of the OCO to be sent to the exchange. I noted the trade times and sent a message using IB's message center. Lets see how long it takes to get a response and hopefully some corrective action.
Here's IB's response: "I have successfully placed bracket orders in the ES contract. It would appear that there is something that is incorrect with your order placement, or with your TWS. Please review the bracket order instructions below: individuals.interactivebrokers .com/en/trading/orders/bracket.php?ib_entity=llc If you are still having problems, please call 877-442-2757, and someone will happily walk you through the bracket order placement process. Thank you." Now why didn't I think of that. After what must be thousands of order entries, I just need to read the instructions.
IMO the most annoying thing a customer service person can do is to not actually read your inquiry but send a canned response based on the subject or keywords. I guess that's the age we live in. Nobody gives a damn about making customers happy, they just want to get you out of their queues as quickly as possible.
There are only a certain number of possibilities. It could be something wrong with TWS. And of course, we know for a fact that any number of times it has been because the settings were wrong, something at the exchange, the individuals computer, the version of java, the internet connection, etc etc. And one thing that would usually be the case, is that when something is wrong with TWS, it typically affect more than one person. That said, way back when I was a BookTrader user....although I never place my stops via BookTrader. Then we went through an upgrade cycle, and suddenly BookTrader didn't work right. What would happen is that I would hit the buy side of the grid, and nothing would happen at all. I would click it several times, and then without warning, it would "take hold", and an order would be entered. I posted here about it, and no one else had the problem. I called IB, they couldn't duplicate the problem. So what I did was to switch to ButtonTrader. With ButtonTrader I never had another issue like that again. And frankly, I have no doubt that my orders will be transmitted and will actually work as they are supposed to. What I really like about ButtonTrader is the service. This guy Robert (AKA Hoi) seems to know TWS inside and out. He tests the new TWS upgrades, makes adjustments in ButtonTrader if necessary, and then approves the upgrade. Gotta tell you, I really like that. It gives me more confidence that everything is going to work as it should. So I'm just throwing it out there. Maybe this had to do with BookTrader, not TWS. There doesn't seem to be any uprising about stop orders not working. Why don't you take a look at ButtonTrader as a front-end. It might help with the issue. OldTrader
Since then I uninstalled TWS and deleted the files that get left behind. (I've been instructed by IB to do this in the past) OCO orders now if anything are even worse so I've just stopped using them.
If you need millisecond latency that could be a problem yes. Otoh, of the total route between your home -> backbone-US -> intercontinental->backbone-HK->servers-IB the part in the US will probably be the slowest. Try to ping some fast servers in HK and compare with current IB servers.