Quote from bnun12:
Stop Limits don't always work either. Entered a buy stop limit for Zn that appeared in Pending orders and the Audit Trail. The order disappeared and I assumed it was filled. IB claims they have no record of the order on their end so I am not filled.
IB's reliability for stop limits in ZN is not good.
Bnun12,
Thank you very much for sending us your Interactive Brokers (IB) Trader WorkStation (TWS) audit-trail. We analyzed it together with the logs and audit-trails written by our servers, and we are now able to explain what happened.
As IB customer service originally stated,
IB's servers never saw this order. In this regard, as indicated in our customer agreement, there is always a chance that our systems may not function as intended (in this case, the TCP/IP connection between the TWS and IB's server was not functioning), and the last few messages that your TWS sent never reached IB servers. In cases such as this, the TWS is designed to switch its screen color to dark pink for a little while, then switch back once the connection is re-established, at which time the TWS will re-download the orders that are present on IB's server, and display them to the user. The orders that were not present on IB's server will be dropped of the TWS screen and this is exactly what happened in your case.
There is an easy way to verify which orders the system knows about, and to check the status of these orders. It is on the "Pending Orders" page:
- Light blue means the order or its modification is in transit, and may not have reached IB servers or an exchange or market center yet.
- Pink means the order cancel request is in transmit and may not have reached IB servers or an exchange or market center yet.
- Other colors (green, red, dark blue, brown) mean the order is being held by IB servers, or is working on an exchange or market center, or that it has been filled or cancelled.
What a TWS user can do to prevent a problem like this from occurring is to watch out for colors that indicate that the transaction is NOT acknowledged, e.g., a light blue or pink color:
- if you see a light blue order on your TWS, the latest version of the order is not necessarily present on IB server, and can disappear if TWS fails to send the order due to communication failure/TCP connection lost.
Once the color turns to green (for limit/market orders), or dark blue (for stop/stop-limit orders), or brown (for conditional orders), the order is residing on IB servers.
- if you see a pink order on your TWS, make sure that it does not remain that way, but instead turns dark red. Otherwise, in case of a reconnect, if the cancellation attempt had not yet been delivered to the TWS, the cancellation attempt may get lost from the TWS.
What an API user can do to prevent a problem like this from occurring:
Your application receives a message once the order is acknowledged by IB server. Until such a message arrives, you should not assume that the transaction is confirmed.
What a third-party order entry front-end user can do to prevent a problem like this from occurring:
- if your application distinguishes between the acknowledged and not-yet-acknowledged orders status, you can use that order status to verify whether or not an order is on IB server.
- if your application assumes that once the order is sent it is placed, you need to contact the author of the front-end and ask him/her to correct it.
What we (IB) will do to make the IB TWS more user-friendly (in the next TWS beta):
TWS will keep track in memory the orders it has transmitted but have not received an acknowledgement for. Upon "soft" re-connect to IB server (the re-connect that does not involve TWS exiting and starting again):
- TWS will retransmit all orders that user has tried to submit and which user did not attempt to cancel yet, and which are not present in the download from the IB server;
- TWS will issue a cancel for all orders that the user attempted to cancel, and which IB server reports in any state other than pending cancellation or cancelled.
IBsoft, kostia00.
