IB - 4/1/17 TWS update, tips and tricks (column issue solved)

TWS latest stable updated to 972.1p overnight. After several rounds where everything went smoothly, this resulted in a few glitches that I noticed and possibly others I haven’t yet. For example,

1. a few of my custom hot keys were wrong and I had to re-record them (after which they were fine).

2. Open orders with attached but not yet active bracket/profit taker/etc orders showed both the open and the contingent orders with a live/green status, which was confusing. The contingent orders are not live orders yet, and new orders placed with attached orders show the typical maroon (inactive / contingent) status. So things are working correctly, but appear weird for legacy GTC orders. Cancel and re-place them if the status display annoys you.

3. some fixed income things are a bit different and somewhat more annoying, still working on resolving those.

If you noticed anything else noticeably changed, and especially if you found work arounds for a problem, please post.
 
Thanks for this thread @MoreLeverage , just discovering it now since I decided to finally try and fix my own nonsense layout stuff. (Using TWS stable 981.x).

1. I'd of course love to get rid of the Ticker Action column, but since that's impossible, the best I can do is drag it to the desired position (the furthest right so that it's largely out of sight).

2. My biggest gripe is with the API tab, which I saw you reference in a post above so seems like you have familiarity with it. For background, I stream market data into Excel, and submit orders from there to TWS in an inactive state, then review them and submit manually from TWS (the idea of submitting live orders directly from Excel seems unwise.) The problem is this: the API tab in TWS does not seem to "remember" / save ANY of the layout-related settings so they have to be re-done EVERY single time I login. No other TWS tabs seem to suffer from this; only the API tab. So, for example, all of the column widths seem to revert to some default (much too wide) width, and I have to drag them to the desired width every single time I launch TWS. And the infernal Ticker Action column won't stay where I drag it to like it does for other tabs...every time I restart TWS, it respawns in exactly the same position (5th out of the 19 columns I have), and I have to drag it all the way to the right:mad:

Again, this is ONLY a problem for the API tab in TWS but it's maddening to have to do every single day. You might wonder why I bother with the API tab at all, but I think I'm stuck with it because when I create orders in Excel and send them to TWS, they automatically populate in the API tab, and nowhere else. I could copy/paste them over to a tab with my preferred layout that DOES get 'remembered', but that's a pretty crude workaround and may not even save much time. Do you use the API tab in TWS and have you noticed similarly buggy behavior where it doesn't save settings unlike other tabs?
 
d0rian said:
Again, this is ONLY a problem for the API tab in TWS but it's maddening to have to do every single day. You might wonder why I bother with the API tab at all, but I think I'm stuck with it because when I create orders in Excel and send them to TWS, they automatically populate in the API tab, and nowhere else. I could copy/paste them over to a tab with my preferred layout that DOES get 'remembered', but that's a pretty crude workaround and may not even save much time. Do you use the API tab in TWS and have you noticed similarly buggy behavior where it doesn't save settings unlike other tabs?
More...
I do use the API but I don’t really look at the API orders page and monitor my trading via alerts from my trading algo directly. That said, you might try either

1. creating a page named API and setting the layout the way you want it and seeing if that helps, or
2. Creating a page with all the tickers you trade for your API, with the format you like, and just looking at that and ignoring the auto generated API page.

I’m not sure exactly what you’re doing with the API page in TWS, but given the orders show up everywhere in TWS where those tickers appear, it seems at least option 2 should work as long as you have a static list of tickers you could put into their own TWS page. Presumably updates to your trading universe don’t happen as often as your daily API monitoring so that could be a less annoying solution.
 
Thanks for the reply; I trade and monitor a lot of options (different dates / strikes) so unfortunately it's hard to create a limited list of instruments that could reside on a new page I create.

I played around a bit more and seems like the API page bugginess is even worse than I'd thought. It won't even 'remember' the Layout that I apply to it. E.g. I thought I might solve this by creating a new Layout ("My_API") and then setting that as the desired layout for the API page like this (that dropdown box previously said 'Default'):

kPWapFa.jpg

Not only does this not fix the problem, but if I log out (saving settings) and then log back in, the Layout shown in the screenshot above has been set back to 'Default'. So basically the API page has complete amnesia and refuses to 'remember' any changes you apply to it. It is a 'special' page, in that it's the one where orders sent to TWS via the API appear (and you can't create a new page titled "API" -- the system won't let you > it generates an error saying "The page name you entered is restricted for external orders"), so not surprising it has a few special properties, but being unable to remember basic settings can't be the intended behavior.
 
thanks for the info. Two more thoughts

1. If API page always uses the Default page layout, maybe you can change that one’s settings (even if you customize other pages’ layouts different)? Maybe then it’ll use the one you want.

2. on the Portfolio page, another special page, there’s a section with holdings and a section with orders. I normally minimize the orders section and use this to look at daily contributors to PNL, but maybe you could minimize the holdings part and only look at the open orders? I’m not sure if you’ll have better luck formatting that page, but I was able to format it somewhat so I think it’s possible.

good luck.
 
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