A couple of thoughts regarding Interactive Brokers

AAAintheBeltway · Jan 22, 2011

Quote from BlueStreek:

... .

In summation, IB needs to really make a commitment to improve their charts to "Best in Class", or acquire a third party High-End Charting package which is state of the art to provide for their clients - avoiding the current clumsy integration issues involved in meshing disparate editions, systems, and "generic" applications not built specifically to interact seamlessly with IB infrastructure.

These changes would be in IB`s interest as well, as it will help attract more capital, creating more trading commission revenue, and better distinguish itself from the competition in an ever increasing 'commoditized business' landscape.

This has been a constant complaint/suggestion over the years. It is frustrating, because it seems so obvious and so easily fixed.

FightTheFuture · Jan 22, 2011

Quote from BSAM:

Since TDA is no longer interested in QuoteTracker, I suggest that IB do what they should have done in the first place. Maybe TDA would like to get, at least, a little bit of their money back.

(Speeeee...Make an offer, IB.)

Purchase QuoteTracker and bring along its creator.

jtrader33 · Jan 22, 2011

Quote from Bob111:

meanwhile,when i submit basket of orders with good after time parameter-it did take less than 1 sec from my PC to IB's to accept the orders, but 45 sec from IB to exchange. 45 fucking seconds from first to last order to became acknowledged and accepted by exchange. where are we? in a fucking stone age? this shit you should work on. faster,smarter,better routing,better executions.

Don't get me started on their "pacing" of GAT orders. For me, this makes the GAT functionality useless...my orders were literally expiring (hitting my GTD time) before the system ever got to them (i would find the irony there funny if it hadn't been so costly). It was certainly frustrating to discover...but if IB can't handle GATs without delays, I can probably come up with a workaround. The killer though is that I can't find this anywhere in the documentation...lost profits were my after-the-fact documentation. If there are going to be little quirks were functionality doesn't work exactly as described THEN JUST DOCUMENT IT...can't understand why that is so difficult.

Another favorite new change of mine is the mulitple minute delay in cancelling OPG orders that don't fill. It's 9:31, the market is moving fast and you need to know your remaining potential risk, if you can take signals from other models in a given ticker, etc...your competitors are getting this feedback in milliseconds, but you'll have sit tight for just a few more MINUTES to get a complete picture...talk about stone ages, i could walk my orders down to the floor faster...hard to fathom how this could reach production.

fullautotrading · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from Bob111:

i've been saying same shit in my every other post about IB for almost a decade. stop this cosmetic changes menace now. i'm sick and tired from either new, more distracting shit or moving old one to some random\hard to find places. my last favorite-highlight few rows to delete \copy\modify-right next to delete\cancel order(which is imo important and i do use it often to cancel multiple orders at once) in 906.9-there is "events calendar" right next to it. WTF? how this relevant to tab with totally different functions?
meanwhile,when i submit basket of orders with good after time parameter-it did take less than 1 sec from my PC to IB's to accept the orders, but 45 sec from IB to exchange. 45 fucking seconds from first to last order to became acknowledged and accepted by exchange. where are we? in a fucking stone age? this shit you should work on. faster,smarter,better routing,better executions. the other day i did choose highest rebate routing,placed some orders,some of them did not execute(stocks) and i left them AH. all "smart". they all routed for whatever reason to direct edge(open till 5pm). after 5 Pm my orders are still showed active and routed to direct edge(which is closed already). why not to reroute them to island or arca,which are open till 8pm? this kind of shit you should work on,IB. i can go on on this crappy TWS issues all fucking day long...the problem is -they wouldn't listen. they keep adding more and more fundamental,research kind of shit to already heavy and slow platform..which was initially designed for active traders. ACTIVE traders damit..not some buy and hold old folks..you are a discount broker for sake..not some full service firm and position yourself accordingly. all we want from you is a GOOD EXECUTION PLATFORM. no fucking charts,no fundamentals,no other useless crap. people who need it should go to some other place. get this trough your head-you can't satisfy everyone.

Completely correct. With the premise that IB is anyway the most serious broker around, here some criticisms:

They focus on useless issues while neglecting crucial ones. There is too little investment and insufficient, archaic, development on the API side.

- For API, make a unique native .NET DLL and stop the DLL hell.
- Remove the damn TWS logoff please, or make it optional! (how many times this has to be said??)
- Add a PNL view to the Gateway. Are we supposed to trade blindly ? This is not serious.

We are in 2011. As said we are not in the stone age. Remove all the dumb "wizards". Make it essential. Focus on the important things.

And listen to the people who friendly tell you that for your own good. Don't be presumptuous.

Tom

trade2live · Jan 24, 2011

I will sum it up with this : IB developers are f*cking clowns putting customers' accounts at risk !

LeeD · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from fullautotrading:

With the premise that IB is anyway the most serious broker around, here some criticisms:

IB is difficult to beat in terms of coverage of international markets and commissisons are pretty competitive. However, in terms of support for fully automated traders there are a few brokers that do much better.

Quote from fullautotrading:

- For API, make a unique native .NET DLL and stop the DLL hell.

By "native" you mean pure .NET, right? Because IB has provided C++ API that compiles into "native" code for some time. Most people think of a "native" DLL as "not .NET".

Quote from fullautotrading:

- Remove the damn TWS logoff please, or make it optional! (how many times this has to be said??)

I don't think this is happening any time soon. First, IB officially DO NOT support unattended autotrading. This just generates too many support requests of the type: "While I was away from the computer, it opened a position in my account and I am loosing money. Where did this buy order come from?" If you are in front of the computer, changing the TWS restart time every time a shut-down warning pops up is very little hassle.

Also TWS becomes slower as it runs. So, it needs to be shut down from time to time to prevent complete freeze. Of course, if you have no charts/market depth/times and sales open, slowdown is much slower (pun intended).

Quote from fullautotrading:

- Add a PNL view to the Gateway. Are we supposed to trade blindly ? This is not serious.

You do know that you can have a second TWS logon linked to the same trading account, don't you? Then you can run the Gateway for your autotrading app and TWS (possibly on a different computer) to track P&L, open orders etc.

Barring that, the API allows requesting account balance etc. So, the autotrading application perhaps should display that.

It is certainly the feature that would be most welcome. However, IB resists it because one satisfied request will lead to many others. First, total account P&L, then P&L by instrument, then open orders, then trade history... In no time we have the Gateway as bloated as TWS.

sprstpd · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from BlueStreek:

Basically, the charts are not very accurate at reflecting the precise "detail" of price action---they give a rough estimate, and with modern price oriented trading, precise data representation on the charts with regard to price bars (even on spikes) needs to be exact for optimal support/resistance identification - this should be overhauled.

I would guess this is due to the fact IB uses snapshot data instead of tick data. But this also makes IBs data almost never lag in fast markets, which in my mind is a good decision.

fullautotrading · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from LeeD:

...
I don't think this is happening any time soon. First, IB officially DO NOT support unattended autotrading. This just generates too many support requests of the type: "While I was away from the computer, it opened a position in my account and I am loosing money. Where did this buy order come from?" If you are in front of the computer, changing the TWS restart time every time a shut-down warning pops up is very little hassle.

Also TWS becomes slower as it runs. So, it needs to be shut down from time to time to prevent complete freeze.

I dont's see what other purpose the Gateway could be if not for unattended trading. Robots are present and future and they brings tons of commissions.
The argument that the program would "freeze" or "becomes slower" after a while is unacceptable to me, and should made ashamed any programmer working there. I am running robots monitoring hundreds of instrument complete with charting and so on they can be up **forever** (and even several instances for machine), and they have problem making a logoff OPTIONAL? Just add the radio button.

"opened a position in my account?" This is unacceptable. I said OPTIONAL: let me take my responsibility of taking it on. I will shut it down when I feel so.

So what i understand is that the programming of the "charting" part is so poor that they need to close the program every few hours because otherwise it would blow up. Hey, have you have heard the word "resampling" ?

I tell you this is inacceptable. A good programmer, indian or not, with some little brain, would take less than an afternoon to devise an efficient scheme of data resampling to maintain the price history with very little data.
If you at IB have problems, I will provide you for free with the procedures to do this efficiently, but please make that damn autologoff OPTIONAL!

Also the Gateway is just fine but the PNL view is needed. You could even have some legal issue for that. The excuse of it becoming like TSW is ridiculous. I am just asking to add a small screen and that's it. NO other things are necessary. And please do not add unnecessary things. Tws is cluttered with at least some hundred unncessary features and you have problem adding just that 1 screen, for which you already have the code ?

I call that lazyness, and if it were my company several heads would be cut off. Also, wrap up all the API stuff into a **UNIQUE ** native .NET usable with c#, vb.net, j#, c++ (supporting 64 bit systems, etc.) etc. I wonder what those guys do all day long. It would take me less than 2 days to making these changes.

I still stand on the opinion that IB is the most serious broker around, that's why i feel i can demand they act accordingly.

Tom

RedDuke · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from MarketMasher:

The reason the data comes across ok in fast markets is because they bundle ticks, so the process that makes them faster in those markets also precludes them from providing tick data, live or historical.

I have not noticed much of a problem with IQFeed or Rithmic.

Yes, they bundle ticks every 250ms. Which is not an issue for myself. And it should not be an issue for manual or auto trading, unless hft. I doubt that anyone serious in hft would use IB.

I only have 1 IB main window open, and have not experienced any slowdowns, I never trade over 5 hours strait though.

Bob111 · Jan 24, 2011

Quote from trade2live:

I will sum it up with this : IB developers are f*cking clowns putting customers' accounts at risk !

i wouldn't call them a clowns,but...somewhere on ET in one post i draw some similarities between them and politicians in DC..what they both do-they create an "appearance' of work by making a lot of cosmetic changes(the easy ones,moving this and that to different places,adding more simple,useless shit) while avoiding the changes that are really needed..it may look productive in their reports(hey! i change appearance of 25 old buttons!),but it isn't in reality