This is mainly for IB customers, since IB has always been very accomodating to its customers requests: I personally would almost always use "SMART_WITHOUT_ARCA" for quotes as well as orders, if IB were to bless us with such a routing option. The occasional penny ARCA could make you is definitely not worth bad quotes for hours every other day and stuck orders virtually every day!
man i am getting so tired of ARCA f^cking up the market... that sh!tty thing is down at least 3x a week... it's like they have a bunch of high school students running the piece of sh!t... nothing like sending an order to ARCA, that black hole of empty quotes...
hehehe... Every time I see the flashing bulletin in TWS, it like "hmmm...... I wonder what's wrong with ARCA now?"
Exactly.... So different than a year or two ago when I traded with Realtick and routed thru ARCA almost exclusively, no problems.
Then you haven't been paying attention, as they practically happen on a daily basis. Let's see, this morning's bulletin at 9:35 said: "Stocks starting with the letters O-Z and DIA are currently unavailable due to technical problems at the [ARCA] ECN."
It's bad enough that RealTick seems to be going through some sort of crisis. You also have to be on the watch for stuck arca quotes, not to mention the Smart issues.
You can customize your SMART order with Cybertrader. And eliminate ARCA from the algorithm. (or any other ECN or MM that you wish)