TT´s Patent and IB´s BookTrader

Refco got sued for patent infringement, others are paying license fees for using the price ladder.
What about IB - they´re still having their Book Trader within their TWS....afaik worst case could be, that TT forces IB to give out the data of all customers who used their BT and then sue the individual traders.

Any thoughts on that?

 

Yes,
I think that if they sue they will sue directly IB and not the customers...

But if they've not done yet....there should be a reason...
Anyway there are lot of nosenses in the whole story... So who knows what is the real project?



Yose

 

No, but good question. IB has been silent on the subject.

 

Isn't IB a big traffic customer at TT's? This might change things a bit.

 

I'm not sure I'm following exactly what you're saying but i think the answer is no.

As far as I know IB is not a customer of TT's because IB has their own front end and don't use TTs software.

IB does support FIX for order routing and TT has FIX support so in theory you could route orders from a TT screen through IB, but I don't think there are many (any?) people currently doing that.

 

This is not a matter of front ends but of world-wide traffic routing.

 

I definitely don't understand what you're saying.

In your previous post you mentioned IB being a big customer of TTs. Could you please expand on what you mean?

 

IB and TT know each other well. The management of both companies had an agreement a long time ago to do something. I believe it was hook TT directly into IB.

I know that TT and IB released some kind of joint announcement way back when on this agreement.

 

I believe that large IB clients can have the option of using X trader as their front end.

Runningbear

 

I seem to recall that agreement went nowhere and was terminated.