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Horrible experience:IB cost me $50,000 this morning
- Thread starter zhexin2
- Start date
Quote from DeeDeeTwo:
Requesting ALL orders or ALL executions is periodically necessary...
If you cannot ** absolutely 100% trust ** individual API events (like change in OrderStatus)...
And in my VB6/Excel ATS implementation I cannot...
And every time you have connectivity issues.
I frequently have 100 executions in a day. I only request all orders or executions after a connection failure. I trust my ATS implementation to properly track orders and executions. I wouldn't work with an ATS that I did not trust.
I assume the 50 message limit is designed to prevent non-stop hyper-active order entry/cancelation without an adequate execution ratio, and if so I think it's reasonable. I wish it was more flexible, allowing for occasional short bursts of activity through out the day
Quote from ronblack:
One think I have learned the hard way is that fully electronic trading is for losers.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is just one moron posting under different usernames or whether there are actually this many idiots who post here. This statement has to be one of the stupidest I have ever read here.
It's not that it's dead wrong. We all know that. It's that someone could show an interest in trading, read about it, register here, read all the posts here, and not be able to figure out what's going on. How dense do you have to be?
Quote from Joab:
Please don't take this the wrong way BUT it serves you right for using a retail (amateur) broker.
I could easily put up 250k with IB for day trading but I had nothing but problem after problem with retail brokers as a professional trader.
IB was the worst too ...
It wasn't till I discovered prop trading and the platforms they use to trade with did it make a huge difference to my bottom line.
Retail is a JOKE used by amateurs
Prop is for professionals.
I trade prop and retail (IB) using fully auto programs. I see no advantage to prop from an execution or automation point of view. In fact I see several advantages to IB including the fact that they support complex order types that allow me to push some decision making off onto IB's servers. My prop firm's software doesn't support any complex order types. IB's API is better written, better documented and better supported than my prop platform (Sterling). You can't even modify an open order through the Sterling API, you have to do a full cxl/replace on your end to modify an order. Sterling also will completely shut down if it senses a connection problem, leaving your programs sitting in limbo. IB will do a background reconnect while maintaining a connection between TWS and your programs. When a connection is reestablished there's a little bit of catchup time (a few seconds?) and my programs are running normally again. After a Sterling shuts completely down I have to re-login to Sterling, restart my programs and execute special recovery routines to restart trading. This takes minutes. Amateur indeed! I guess you could call Sterling professional level because I have to pay a monthly fee to use it? Or perhaps because you need to be a professional programmer to write programs for it?
I also feel there is more liquidity available at IB than at my prop firm. At my prop firm I can route to DirectEdge and hope for price improvement. There's no internal matching at all. At IB I get a significant number of fills on SMART and IDEAL, routes not available at my prop firm.
Finally, the 2 most profitable traders I know (multiple 7 fig PnL) trade strictly 100% retail, full auto. 1 at IB, 1 elsewhere.
So the experience of myself and other professional automated retail traders contradict your statements. I'd love to hear what platform you're running your programs on and why you think it is better?
Regarding the OP's problem, I concur that he likely ran into the 50 msg/sec limit of the IB API. You need to add some code to limit your order rate. BTW, this limit also exists on my "prop" platform.
Quote from Shreddog:
the 2 most profitable traders I know (multiple 7 fig PnL) trade strictly 100% retail, full auto. 1 at IB, 1 elsewhere.
[/B]
Oh, man, you got my attention, that's beautiful music to my ears! (I assume you mean 7 figure "P" not "L.")
I hope you can find some time to tell us a little more about them. Do they trade futures? Can't be stocks if IB is the broker.
Quote from 4DTrader:
Oh, man, you got my attention, that's beautiful music to my ears! (I assume you mean 7 figure "P" not "L.")
I hope you can find some time to tell us a little more about them. Do they trade futures? Can't be stocks if IB is the broker.
100% stocks in both cases. And yes, one of them has historically done most of his volume at IB.
Both are somewhat active posters on ET. That's all I'm comfortable saying. I'm not trying to bring attention on them, but rather expose the complete fallacy that you can't make money trading retail or that trading prop is somehow better than retail.
Historically there were some good advantages to prop, but most of those advantages are gone. Now days, prop gets you access to more capital. If you don't need the capital, there just aren't that many incentives to go prop anymore. If you're doing 3M+ shrs/month at IB, it's likely your rates are lower than most (not all) prop firms.
My IB programs made far more money in 2007 than my programs that run on Sterling. YTD, my Sterling programs are outperforming slightly, but only because one of my IB programs hasn't done well in this volatility. And I have to say I cringe when I find a new idea is better suited to my prop firm and I have to write it for Sterling. It's just so much harder to code for Sterling. I do about 300-600K shrs per day,FWIW.
Quote from zhexin2:
I am a program trader. I shorted around 300 stocks of totally 4.5 million dollars. when I decided to close those positions, IB refused to take my order. All the liquidating orders were in the status "acknowledged but not transmitted". Until One hour later, my order started to take effective. This is very horrible today since the nasdaq kept going up. The stupidity of IB cost me 50K. later on, I received a message from IB "over excessive order submission, and my account is flagged". On Tuesday this week, I had the same problem but that time I did not receive IB message about the excessive submission warning.
this problem occurred a number of times when there were too many positions in my account. I wonder any one came across the same problem.
let me get this straight,
on a $4,500,000 you loss less than 1%, or $50,000 (ouch)...
on a $4,500 account the equivalent loss is $50.....(ohhh)....
----
just curious
I was kinda surprised at how hard to believe, the size of the account, others made comments on....
putting it in the average trader's terms, with account sizes more in line with most of the traders on this board, then the $50 loss, or less than 1% is, well ......
hey, hope you can get things right with IB
Quote from DeeDeeTwo:
This probably the most naive thing I have ever read on ET...
Taking into consideration that the poster appears to be an adult.
For some people... it's still 1999...
And old school brokers pray for smug mooks like you.
The "logic" that someone charging you $0.003/share would systematically cheat you...
But someone charging you TRIPLE that would "help" you...
Is positively mindboggling.
Put it well in your mind that electronic brokers will screw you at one point or another, intentionally or unintentionally. and it will cost you more than a full service broker.
You have limited experience trading, this is clear. You are probably a small time trader who counts the pennies after placing that 100 share lot.
Full service is NOT for you. Actually, they will turn you down. You sound like the person who envies those that drive expensive cars and have big houses. You will never make money trading through electronic brokers. Probably, you have already blown up your $1,000 account.
Too bad there are people in these threads who have serious attitude problem.
Ron
Quote from powerfade:
Sometimes I wonder whether this is just one moron posting under different usernames or whether there are actually this many idiots who post here. This statement has to be one of the stupidest I have ever read here.
It's not that it's dead wrong. We all know that. It's that someone could show an interest in trading, read about it, register here, read all the posts here, and not be able to figure out what's going on. How dense do you have to be?
Put it well in your mind that electronic brokers will screw you at one point or another, intentionally or unintentionally. and it will cost you more than a full service broker.
You have limited experience trading, this is clear. You are probably a small time trader who counts the pennies after placing that 100 share lot.
Full service is NOT for you. Actually, they will turn you down. You sound like the person who envies those that drive expensive cars and have big houses. You will never make money trading through electronic brokers. Probably, you have already blown up your $1,000 account.
Too bad there are people in these threads who have serious attitude problem.
Ron
By the way, I just noticed that most of your recent posts are in Politics & Religion and you constantly attack other posters. You have a serious problem, these threads are not for you. No trader has time to participate in a forum about Palestinians. Since you have done that, it is clear you do not trade and probably you have never traded.
Ron
Ron
Quote from powerfade:
Sometimes I wonder whether this is just one moron posting under different usernames or whether there are actually this many idiots who post here. This statement has to be one of the stupidest I have ever read here.
It's not that it's dead wrong. We all know that. It's that someone could show an interest in trading, read about it, register here, read all the posts here, and not be able to figure out what's going on. How dense do you have to be?