I'm facing the same problem trading eurodollar spreads. The "illiquidity charge" means that my initial margin is currently nine times the maintenance margin. This must be the most retarded decision ever from IB.
The problem is that NinjaTrader builds all real time bars from tick data and doesn't backfill them with the correct backfill data from IB. I had to write a backfiller myself to correct this.
Also: Why is there no support for Singapore dollar denominated contracts? Why is this so hard to add?
You are right about the average occurance of the minerals in the earths crust. However, the rarity is here referring to the distribution of the minerals. You need a much higher concentration than the average in order to be able to mine the mineral. For gold a mining pit ususally have a...
You are presenting a price improvement of the ask price. There is nothing illegal about that and anyone is free to lift your offer if they wish to do so.
TWS keeps log files called log.Mon.txt, log.Tue.txt etc. in the IBJts directory. Open the latest one and look for gw1.ibllc.com (US), gw1.ibllc.ch (Switzerland) or gw1.ibllc.com.hk (Hong Kong). This tells you which server TWS is communicating with.