Why isn't IB up here defending themselves?

TWS definitely needs to be improved. So many annoyances and glitches. No matter how powerful your system its performance does not improve.

Yes IB is a great broker. But when your front end piece of software that people use to interact with your services is so frought with hiccups and performance issues it sullys the perception of the service as a whole.

 

Java was the right choice. Can run on multiple platforms without having to install anything beyond Java. I suspect that the code could be made more efficient to reduce load time. They probably made the decision to load / initialize everything up front (whether it's needed or not later) so that once it is loaded, there's no additional delay for pulling up an option chain or using any of the built-in tools.

 

TWS does have issues, but at least it will run on Linux.

 

Does it run any better under Linux?

I'm running into charts taking forever to load, or just not loading. Intraday vwap indicator line being wrong, and even different between different charts of the same stock, tws not registering keystrokes when typing in a ticker, and many other annoyances

 

One thing needs to be improved at least a bit are margins.. ~ 25k for dax overnight is unacceptable.

 

High margins for futures traders lets people doing long term investing in their IB account sleep soundly.

 

I don't know if it runs "better" under Linux. I don't have any other OS to compare it to. I have had problems with mouse sensitivity on Chart Trader. It has caused me to fumble a few times when moving orders up or down. Not really thinking it is a TWS problem though. Been too busy to investigate thoroughly. Occasionally charts load slow. But I often have 10 charts displaying at once, over two monitors. Trading computer is an Optiflex with an upgraded graphics card but still the stock 240w PSU. Sometimes when I start the app one or more chart windows will fail to materialize. If I look in minimized windows, they are generally there, and I just normalize and all is good. No problems with keystrokes registering, that I have noticed, but I will watch for that since you mention it.

I don't know of any reason for expecting TWS to run significantly better on Linux than Windows unless maybe the hardware is not recent vintage. Linux makes much better use of limited computing resources than WinDOHs. What I DO know is that in this industry there is very little thought given to Linux users, in spite of the fact that the average trader handles many thousands of dollars at a time OVER THE INTERNET. You would think that security would be important, right? But anyway, I really only have two choices, and that is TOS or TWS. And since I decided to go with IB, being the cheaper brokerage and reportedly better than TDA, then TWS was it, and I am learning to get around with it better and better. I have considered trying kludgy workarounds like the webware version of DAS, for instance, or running NinjaTrader in Wine, and I am thinking about getting involved with the IB API from within Python, but honestly I don't have much time for all that. TWS is like I said, working pretty good overall, for me. I may change platforms but not right away. If LightSpeed supported Linux users, I would give them a try, but I am thinking that the performance difference at my level of trading would not be a real tree shaker. Not sure about that, YMMV.

 

There are plenty of other options to use as the front end for IB -- MotiveWave has a lot of people using their IB accounts with MotiveWave as their front end.

 

Looked into Motivewave. But you can't have custom hot keys for placing orders which makes it a no go

 

Custom hot keys for placing orders will actually be part of the next beta release for our version 6. The next beta should be available in approx. 1-2 weeks (they're just finishing up the coding this week on that feature).