Building your own program to live trade with IB?

GloriaBrown said:
Thx for sharing. How about spot fx price? The live price is free.
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Whatever you have in TWS is the same you can get through the API. So if the data is live for free in TWS, it's also available in API; if the data is only delayed (no subscription) in TWS, it's not available in API.
 
HobbyTrading said:
I started with the example programs which were provided by IB. And used these to make some experimental programs myself. While doing I found better ways on how to structure and arrange my programs. I am running automated systems in Java. They collect the necessary data (account data, instrument price data, etc), do calculations and place orders if necessary. Looking back I would say that this core setup is the easy part. The more complicated part is handling errors: what do you do if a certain piece of information is missing? If a connection is lost or a server offline? What do you do if a received value seems incorrect? How do you handle exceptional cases? How about holidays, or timezone changes (e.g. daylight savings time)? It is these kind of things that took me the most time to understand, get used to, and know how I want my system to respond to. This will obviously depend a lot on your trading style and on how you want your system to respond, so general guidelines are difficult to give.
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We have an almost identical experience, although mine is in Python. First I wrote the basic data gathering and order placing calls, I thought that's it, I'm almost done. Little did I realize that was just about 25% of the job - timezone adjustments, dividend/split adjustments, tick size functions, currency conversions, making sure different strategies keep track of each other when they need to (while having different clientIds), halting functions when connection issues occurred etc took 75% of the time.
 
d08 said:
We have an almost identical experience, although mine is in Python. First I wrote the basic data gathering and order placing calls, I thought that's it, I'm almost done. Little did I realize that was just about 25% of the job - timezone adjustments, dividend/split adjustments, tick size functions, currency conversions, making sure different strategies keep track of each other when they need to (while having different clientIds), halting functions when connection issues occurred etc took 75% of the time.
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Thx for these experience sharing.
 
They do provide standard FIX (though they are a bit behind the most current version) but you pay quite a bit as retailer. Usd 1500 per month in minimum commission (obviously this is a moot point for anyone exceeding that that commission level) or so if I remember correctly. I was on FIX years ago but we completely abandoned it due to version inconsistencies between brokers and the time it took to adjust to broker specifc tags used or not used. Apis are way faster by nature and a good developer writes a new api interface as fast or faster than someone having to go through the entire FIX qualification process. But that is just my own opinion.

By the way for any quirks that are not mentioned in the official IB API documentation the best resource by far is still the very active TWS API user group https://groups.io/g/twsapi

sle said:
I was under impression that they support a proper FIX protocol with some IB-specific quirks, no?
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