Why is IB's time 5 seconds behind the official time?

TimberHill has mastered time travel.

 

A friend told me that IB data is lagging compared to an other broker.
Someone could check this please ?
Fisho

 

your friend would be wrong.

 

Your friend is lying to you.

 

Well,
let's try to be practical... there is internet latency. We are in Italy so maybe the italian server has a faster ping time.
(fractions of a second)
If someone could check again...

 

Check what? You haven't mentioned the other broker's name.

 

It is an italian broker. If we try different brokers possibly with the ping values, we could have a realistic picture.

 

Fisho:

Go here: http://www.pingplotter.com/. There are three versions. The freeware version, located at the bottom of the screen is good enough for what you want. Download. Run against your IB server and the Italian broker. That will allow you to calculate the difference in latency between IB and the Italian broker.

What you will not know is the time difference between IB's entire data path to its european(?) server and your Italian broker's data path between the exchanges and its server.

Jack

 

Don't be naive. This is being checked and compared every day, every minute and every second: Most traders have more than one datafeed and/or more than one broker. If there is anything fishy going on, you would have heard people screaming all over this forum. No debate is necessary.

 

I can tell you the IB time is pretty accurate (a few seconds off is possible though). So it is important to have an accurate system clock, and most are not. The problem is due to ACPI, and becomes worse if you have dual core / quad core / multiple processors. My clock was losing 2 minutes per day (bad for knowing when the market closes). There are a million programs to synchronize to an atomic clock, which can "fix" your clock every few minutes, but the most efficient solution is to disable Windows Time Service and get a real NTP service.

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Main/ExternalTimeRelatedLinks

The NTP service runs transparently, and only queries a time server as often as you need it. It uses smart interpolation to correct any "drift" in the meantime. It will keep your clock accurate to within milliseconds. I use the Windows port by Terje Mathisen. If you have trouble installing it, PM me.