Alternatives to TWS that support IB's API

B

bernied

I'm an active Canadian options swing trader / stock investor (say 50-50). A mix of medium-term (days/weeks/months) to long term (years). What are alternatives to TWS that connect with their API ?

Some background:

I'm very happy with IB's brokerage part, their back-end. It's rock solid, cheap and performs quite well.

But TWS sucks. So much that it seems IB gives it as a last option, sort of like "in case you're broke", use it. It's slow, sluggish, charts suck, it sometimes freezes even on a good computer. I endured it too long (many years), now I'm looking for a good alternative. To replace the TWS part.

I'm currently trying Medved Trader and TC2000. Medved connects to IB's API and seems ok although perhaps a bit basic, while TC2000 seems more advanced and polished but does not connect to IB, bummer.
 
I've tried what you have tried. Medved I just couldn't get use to. Best combo I found is have separate charting software and just use TWS for the executions.

Personal preference between the TC2000, Thinkorswim, Esignal platforms.
 
In charting IB is poor agreed.. however the freezing issues I do not have and I am running a lot of software on my computer including BB terminal, complex excel sheets with tons of automated macros, and many pages of TWS (over 4 monitors).

For the freezing issues did you try increasing the dedicated RAM allocation in the global settings of the TWS? Do you have enough RAM/ vRAM ? For example on my high end laptop (when I have to travel) it freezes a lot, on my high end setup at home, never (high end processor, video card, 64gig ram).

Besides charting what other issues do you think are improved by leaving IB , curious for myself .
 
alphahunter said:
In charting IB is poor agreed.. however the freezing issues I do not have and I am running a lot of software on my computer including BB terminal, complex excel sheets with tons of automated macros, and many pages of TWS (over 4 monitors).

For the freezing issues did you try increasing the dedicated RAM allocation in the global settings of the TWS? Do you have enough RAM/ vRAM ? For example on my high end laptop (when I have to travel) it freezes a lot, on my high end setup at home, never (high end processor, video card, 64gig ram).

Besides charting what other issues do you think are improved by leaving IB , curious for myself .
More...


Like in OP’s case, for me IB/TWS is also extremely slow and briefly freezing all the time, I end up cursing many times I try to place orders. It works great when you trade stocks or a few options, but once you trade a lot of options then you’re pretty much screwed. I moved TWS to a dual Xeon 24-core server with 384 GB RAM and tried to adjust TWS RAM between 4 GB and 32 GB, but nothing helps. It’s not a RAM issue and sometimes less RAM for TWS seems to work better. It seems to be more of a problem with their GUI widgets updating and syncing data, especially streaming quotes. . The problem possibly could be fixed by being able to set refresh time for quotes (which TWS doesn’t allow), vs being forced to stream them all the time.

You didn’t even mention trading options like OP did, so do you trade them? And how many and how often? Try having a few hundred options combos in your portfolio and watchlists, then see how happy you’ll be with TWS.
 
Last edited:
Yep, I also have maybe 100 options of some sorts (in a ratio of approx 20% combos, 20% shorts, maybe 60% longs). So yea being able to limit (throttle) the refresh rate on these would be a definite plus. But TWS rarely if ever gets real feature updates, so it seems obvious IB's not willing to spend much effort on make us happy with it.
 
alphahunter said:
In charting IB is poor agreed.. however the freezing issues I do not have and I am running a lot of software on my computer including BB terminal, complex excel sheets with tons of automated macros, and many pages of TWS (over 4 monitors).

For the freezing issues did you try increasing the dedicated RAM allocation in the global settings of the TWS? Do you have enough RAM/ vRAM ? For example on my high end laptop (when I have to travel) it freezes a lot, on my high end setup at home, never (high end processor, video card, 64gig ram).

Besides charting what other issues do you think are improved by leaving IB , curious for myself .
More...

I have a decent pc with 32GB rams, Windows 10 Pro core i7 3.75ghz with 250GB SSD. Only bottleneck perhaps is my GFX card. I purchased this box used but forgot about replacing the gfx card, I wanted to do it earlier. Maybe this'd help... I did increase TWS' ram settings, but didn't improve much I felt.

See my benchmark here:
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/24997706 - A bit old though. I added RAM after and changed hard drives. My 4x8gb is some semi-cheap brand, the benchmark doesn't score too good, perhaps another clue. I'll try and post an updated version later to compare...

Anyway, I still think it's a waste of time to try and make TWS usable. At this point I have too many gripes with it to lose more time on it. But thanks for the input!
 
damoonrulz1 said:
I've tried what you have tried. Medved I just couldn't get use to. Best combo I found is have separate charting software and just use TWS for the executions.

Personal preference between the TC2000, Thinkorswim, Esignal platforms.
More...

Thanks, that seems like a pretty decent arsenal. I'm liking TC2000 the more I spend time with it. I also have Thinkorswim but just haven't spent the time learning it much yet. Seems mighty but a bit intimidating, perhaps not the simplest to learn... But yea it does seem reasonable to have both. Then it's just a matter of sync'ing both, do-able to some extent by using export-import features. Not ideal but not that bad either.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top