Quote from dcraig:
I've seen this remark posted a numbers of times and I'd bet just about anything that it is not correct.
The problem is that it is not just a matter of waving a magic wand, forking out some dollars and you get 100% up time. These systems are complex and there are all sorts of failure modes, some of which may not have been foreseen by the system designers and some of which are just too expensive to design for.
Try out a couple of failure scenarios. Single computer room/data centre but all systems in data centre and its connectivity are redundant. Fire in computer room means the whole lot is shut down. As a customer are you prepared to pay for the cost of a second data centre replicating everything in the first one ?
I recall an incident in Sydney quite a number of years ago where a nut case got loose with an axe in the understreet telecoms cabling and took out a lot of the telecoms to the CBD. It's hard (and expensive) to design for that kind of thing.
These might be extreme cases, but they are illustrative of the difficulties of achieving 100% up time and even more so within a specific budget. Engineering is all about designing to a budget.
Nobody here (except IB reps) knows what that IB infrastructure looks like, and I would guess that IB considers that information commercially confidential. But to suggest that there are not large measures of redundancy is almost certainly wrong.
The bottom line is that as customers, making suppositions about IB infrastructure is not very useful. The only thing that counts is the level of service availability. IB don't do themselves any favours by not ensuring that the system status page is always up to date and accurate.
It's been said before, but risk management has got to take into account system failures whether at brokerage, exchange, internet, or your trading computer(s), power supply etc.
A couple of comments. Yes, the ax-wielding maniac example is extreme. That's like 'meteor crashes into building where main server is housed
and simultaneously another one crashes into building where backups are housed'. I wouldn't expect them to be able to deal with that.
I do want to point out that my statement was simply that IB does not have redundancy at this time. We can split hairs about what the term means but 45 minutes of system wide blackout means that they don't have redundancy, IMO. When I say redundancy, I mean if there is a system wide outage, you can get things up and running in a few minutes. That's good enough for me. Now the question is - do we expect redundancy out of a broker and what other businesses/organizations have it?
Well, as you will probably agree, there are systems within the realm of the financial data processing world that have it. And yes, it means whatever, a data farm in a separate room/building/city/country. Am I willing to pay what would be necessary to have such redundancy with my broker? Since my account is small compared to the big players, I probably couldn't afford it, so that point is well taken.
Let's forget about 100% uptime for a moment. So the IB servers go down on Friday. Fine, we don't expect 100% uptime. What is a reasonable period of downtime? I can assure you that there are traders out there who lost a lot of money, for whom the actual 45 minutes was not reasonable. Am I an IT guy? Nope. But do I believe that there is a way for them to take some of their profits and make sure that if the worst happens and they have a sudden system wide outage, that they can set up something where they can get people access to execution until they get the problems sorted out, and do it in less than 45 minutes? You're damn straight I believe they could.
In the end my take on it was that the entire system going down has to happen at some point in time. 45 minutes to get it back up and running is not ideal and IB should be able to do much better, even taking into account their IT budget. Does IB have a somewhat idiosyncratic take on tech issues?Well, they are in a tech business. But let's look at TWS. Even IB patriots like kiwi and OldTrader have agreed that IB is more interested in tweaking obscure aspects of TWS than making it a completely rock-solid platform. I get pinkouts all the time, but they don't last. Is this acceptable? The only other ongoing complaint about IB that has any validity, IMO, is the one about TWS and how they are always releasing new versions which don't work.
I am aware that the company clear xx % of all the trades in yy market. Do they know tech? Clearly they do. I bet they have different setups for their biggest customers.
Another aspect of it is one of two things that resonate in all the bogus complaints I hear about IB - their attitude is 'We aren't going to tell you anything'. Now, if you are in trouble and you go see a lawyer, you know what the lawyer tells you? 'Under no circumstances are you to admit anything'. So this is understandable. It's also a drag for clients. You seem to agree. In fact IB told me that the problem was not theirs - the guy I spoke to told me it was 'an internet problem'. Obviously that was a load of crap.
IB know their business. If they had mass migrations of customers who told them, as they were walking out the door, 'I'm leaving because TWS sucks' or 'I'm leaving because you have too much downtime', then they would do something about it. Do you agree?
The fact that they don't means either
1) The problems aren't bad enough to cause mass migrations or
2) There aren't any other viable choices in the marketplace.
In Canada, 2) is definitely correct - there aren't any other firms that offer what IB does. But 1) is also substantially correct, at least in my experience and so far.
I would like to know if Advantage Futures has ever had a 45 minute blackout in the history of the company. I traded there for a while and I am betting that the answer is no.
