Traderum, You are correct in your suspicion, but you are off when it comes to the actual mechanism of monitoring. The market makers and brokers/traders can read your mind, so they know what you are going to trade before you even turn on your computer. In fact, when you wake up in the morning, they already know what you are going to trade that day. So they have plenty of time to rig the markets against you. To sum up, there is absolutely no way you can make money trading, so you should just move on to something more productive in life.
Instead of worrying about this, just check! TWS uses TCP port 4000. Set up a sniffer to look at the traffic and see whether it sends anything (aside from the market data requests) when you start to type in an order. Also, if you're using the trade simulator that's using "faux data", it's not sending any actual orders to MMs. I thought you acknowleged this a few days ago.
it's called killing the golden goose... In a sense it's hard for a broker... If has to hedge your position, and you are winning... The only way for them is to find a way to hedge without getting the opposite exposition as you have...
I'm sure it does. The moment I open the mask the price goes automatically up. This happens nearly always, ie. it's repeatable. Yes, a network sniffer will prove it. I'll investigate this next week. No, no, it sure sends the orders to MMs. Hey, in the last days I'm trading mainly with the MMs directly! Believe it or not! The MMs in the IB demo are maybe MM aspirants, but they are there and I can "deal" with them, that I can assure you. BTW, I've even been able to "overtake" the job of one of the MMs (of the ticker AIG). That was really an adventure, a thriller I can say. But in the end I won! Since this was the first time, I learnt much of this adventure. That guy has lost much money, prestige, and maybe even his job!
How do you trade "against" a market maker in a sim account? If IB sends your sim trade (even with an "offset", as you say), how would it work? If the MM takes the trade, what will he settlement with? After all, you have no cash in the sim account (real cash, that is) to deliver against. Or, do you think IB is basically funding your trades?
Yes, it seems IB (and the network they have formed up for this) is doing the funding (ie. some orgs & corps seem to have set up such an experimental trade network using real market participation & data w/offsets). I guess it is a zero-sum game for them, they don't lose anything, in the end they bring the balances back to initial levels between them. That's my guess of course. Their demo web site says the demo would use previous week's data or so, but IMO that simply cannot be true.
So you think whenever someone do a demo trade on their demo server (and everyone can do this), they are following through the trade with real money? Why would they do that?
I think it is called paranoia. Really, if markets do this to you all the time you probably should look for another job.