While trying to dump 1000 shares this morning, i made the mistake of using limit orders. If you were asleep at the open today, the market was moving very fast for the first ten minutes. I was using SMART routing, and trying to hit bids with 100sh increments, and my orders were almost always sent to Island, where they were not filled in time, despite there being a valid bid from another ECN or MM at my limit price. Well, IB, you just found another way to fuck me. Congrats. Anyone out there switch from IB to Point Direx? Please IM me with your experience so far. I think that was just the last straw with IB for me. Thanks!
BTW, if anyone else had a similar experience, please post it and we can (maybe) figure out what went wrong. (The above post was referring to closing out a long position, not initiating a short, and the stock was nas NMS). I was selling 100-200sh per order and aiming for bids. Normally execution is IB's strong point, but I've never had an experience like this. It's my assumption that when I sent in the order (and in retrospect I should've been using market orders, but normally I never ever use market orders since I mostly trade listed) there was an ISLD bid at my limit price, but someone else beat me to it, and what I don't get is if I sent the order in as SMART, why it didn't reroute to the other bid at the same price instead of keeping it at ISLD moving my sell to the offer side??? Do only market orders automatically reroute to another destination if your initial venue has already been hit??
why don't you call the help desk and ask them to see exactly what happened with your orders? I have asked in the past and they have done an "audit trail" to see where your order was sent and you will see why you missed the trade. (perhaps it was an IB problem but you will never know until you contact them)
bung: as far i've seen, re-routing occours in certain intervals. ib's servers check not always for the opportunity to reroute, so you are better off with cancel & new order.
I don't think this is the case. I had a trade not too long ago that didn't execute and I was told that IB constantly searched for a an order to match against your limit order. For example I sent a limit order to sell IBM at $90.55. The order was sent to the NYSE. The stock downticked but after a few minutes IBM came back and the NYSE was $90.60 bid - trading at $90.65 at the NYSE. In the destination column, it indicated that my order was at the NYSE. But I never got a fill. When I asked for an audit trail it was shown that my order went initially to the NYSE but just before the NYSE went $90.60 bid, there was another $90.60 bid on Island so my order was cancelled at the NYSE in order to sell to Island but just as the order was cancelled the bid on Island disappeared and the time the order was sent back to the NYSE then that bid was also gone. It is possible that this can happen.
http://www.interactivebrokers.com/html/webhelp/TWS_Reference_Information/LimitOrderFlow.htm If you look at the 2nd diamond from the bottom in the flowchart, it looks like it spends 10 seconds at each destination. Is my understanding correct? I don't know why smart order routing can't continually search for the best price.
It only spends 10 seconds at the destination if there should be an execution with no response from the market. If the order is no longer marketable at the destination then it immediately will go to another destination if it can find a match. I'm not sure if this order routing depends on "IB QUOTES". If it does then if IB is having a quote problem then one should never send their orders via SMART/BEST.
Doesn't that pretty much already answer your question? I don't use IB, but, in fast market conditions, esp. during the first 10 mins., and almost no matter how good your connection is, you can't even be sure that the quotes you're seeing are up-to-the-second. You'd have to ask IB how they're algorithm is written, and how long it takes to cancel an unmatched ISLD order, and what it goes through before it aims for and tries to hit another possible source of liquidity, and so on, but you can't even be sure, I don't think, what the system was "seeing" during the (split?) seconds during which you were observing.