I agree that hidden orders are common. But if I put out a LMT for 500 shares on SMART at the inside, it seems as if TWS should show at least 500. But that's not always the case as i've seen TWS show less than 500 in that situation.
RST today. On the upper left is the Ameritrade L2 feed. Just below is is the IB L1 feed, which is correct. (via the API) But look at the TWS, it shows only 100 for the size on the bid and ask . All symbols set to SMART so this is not good. Happens all the time, and has been a problem for quite a while.
I can see everyone is impressed with the fact that the quotes are wrong. More proof there are only 3 1/2 traders on ET.
While many of us use IB for execution I don't know any traders that use their quotes to trade off of. IB quotes are good as backup, but other than globex, they are just not reliable.
i think IB is picking only one of the destinations (usually the largest size) and shows it under the smart routing. as mentioned above, IB sucks when it comes to market data - and likely is one of the worse in the industry... i agree with bob - the cumulative should be shown for smart.
Actually they are fine for all of the Nikkei futures, HSI, STW, and the european futures. If one cared about bid/ask volume or tick counts you might call them unreliable but the combination of real time data and 5 second (true) data is both reliable and accurate (With Sierra Chart the 5 second data can be used to correct any high low errors in the real time output).
I don't know where you get that. Other than the anomalies we're highlighting here, IB quotes are among the most reliable and the fastest. Of there many thousands of customers, do you really think no one is trading off the prices? Let's not get carried away. The problems are likely programming bugs that simply are going unaddressed.