IB: API problems placing first order of the day (sometimes)

promagma · Mar 3, 2010

Quote from vikana:

It's actually an interesting response. The fact they create UI objects such as tabs not on the swing thread, shown a fundamental lack of understanding of how Swing (the UI engine) works. It's at least a very dangerous thing to do in a threaded environment.

Scary ...

+1

Also explains why sleeping the thread for a couple seconds or calling reqCurrentTime() is a workaround, the delay increases the chance that the UI thread will finish working. No guarantees though, so it is a serious design flaw.

mcdull · Mar 4, 2010

Quote from vikana:

It's actually an interesting response. The fact they create UI objects such as tabs not on the swing thread, shown a fundamental lack of understanding of how Swing (the UI engine) works. It's at least a very dangerous thing to do in a threaded environment.

Scary ...

oh... how can they make this kind of mistakes?

I have done programming on several UI programming frameworks/toolkits before. In order to have a reliable program, all these toolkits require UI related function calls be called in the main UI event loop thread.

dcraig · Mar 4, 2010

Quote from mcdull:

oh... how can they make this kind of mistakes?

I have done programming on several UI programming frameworks/toolkits before. In order to have a reliable program, all these toolkits require UI related function calls be called in the main UI event loop thread.

Often you can get away with it in Swing, but it is very bad practice and the SUN doc repeatedly warns about this. There are utility functions to do it the right way: SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait () or SwingUtilities.invokeLater ().

However the problem might be a bit more complex in TWS, involving other synchronization issues. Who knows?

nello · Mar 4, 2010

The final upshot (IMHO) is that regardless of the intricacies of Swing - and I do agree with your comments - it is amazing that anyone could have seriously created a trading API where any UI problem can prevent trades from being processed.

Obviously, the API is a tacked-on afterthought to a little Swing app, and IB honestly doesn't take this interface seriously. If they did, they would hire some real developers and fix the architecture. It also wouldn't take 10 months to fix a simple bug like this one.

mgmaggie · Mar 4, 2010

Quote from muller:

Thanks for your initiative, nello. But you're definately not a guy I would want to do discretionary business with.

I'm having this sort problem for months now.
My first orders of the day are usually getting delayed for about 13 seconds. Today it was extreme though; there was 1 minute delay, and my cancel order was delayed as well as the price moved against me.
My kinda workaround is to enter a limit order outside the bid-ask spread which cannot get filled. Once I cancel this dummy-order everthing's working smoothly.
Today though I've forgot about this procedure.

I don't understand your comment. The poster is placing the order here in frustration and too assist US as traders. Yes it is personal information a person has with their broker but that doesn't mean the poster has no ethics.

I am very thankful of such posters.

I have had the above issue and many others. Presently I also am waiting to hear back from IB on my ticket.

thanks again for your post.

nello · Mar 6, 2010

Folks, I just discovered something that is just, plain, unbelievable.

If you remember, the detailed response I got from IB about this issue included these words of wisdom:

5. There is no workaround, development team has been asking to use 902 of TWS. The browser based is currently 903 already.

Well, I've just been to the IB site to do my upgrade: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=tws , as I found that my TWS hadn't detected that version 902 was actually available. And guess what I found? VERSION 902 HASN'T BEEN RELEASED YET! They have skipped it for the online beta, but you cannot currently download and install any version greater than 901.

THESE GUYS HAVE HIT ROCK BOTTOM AND STARTED TO DIG.

muller · Mar 6, 2010

Quote from nello:

Folks, I just discovered something that is just, plain, unbelievable.

If you remember, the detailed response I got from IB about this issue included these words of wisdom:

Well, I've just been to the IB site to do my upgrade: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=tws , as I found that my TWS hadn't detected that version 902 was actually available. And guess what I found? VERSION 902 HASN'T BEEN RELEASED YET! They have skipped it for the online beta, but you cannot currently download and install any version greater than 901.

THESE GUYS HAVE HIT ROCK BOTTOM AND STARTED TO DIG.

Yeah, last week I was downloading 902 manually from their site, too. When I was about to install it, it said "you are already running version 901".
I think they are aware about their glitches and working on it, that's why they're delaying the release.

Rodney King · Mar 6, 2010

Quote from nello:

THESE GUYS HAVE HIT ROCK BOTTOM AND STARTED TO DIG.

Ummm, if you're so dissatisfied with this vendor, why don't you use another, rather than wasting your weekend ranting about them? Just wondering.

nello · Mar 6, 2010

Um, I'm not sure... are you a troll or a fanboy? Either way, you have added precisely zero to this discussion.

We stay with them because the good outweighs the bad for now. As anyone with half a brain would understand. On the other hand, they do have real problems with both their customer service and software development. That you apparently would prefer not to talk about.

Pull your head in.

nello · Mar 8, 2010

Hi Folks,

In the absence of an actual release 902 from IB to resolve this problem, I have been experimenting with viable workarounds to raise the API window before my first trade is performed.

I'm sure you all have your own perfectly good versions of this by now, but in the spirit of sharing (trolls aside) I have found that performing a single share buy with Contract.m_symbol="DUMMY" works just fine. It does interfere with my tracking of real mistakes in symbol names, but for now I can live with that.

Most other suggested solutions so far in this forum have either involved introducing a trading lag of our own, or don't seem to have any effect on the API window, so I offer this for what it's worth.