IB Suggestions & Improvements

How does IB calculate or get the maket price for options that are used in margin calculations? An option that is 12.60 bid13.30 offered last trade 13.10 shows up in the account window as a market price of 19.86. Why is this?
 
Lots of neat new stuff in the last few months IB!

Some bugs and cosmetic suggestions:

1. Under some circumstances, alarms trigger and continue to play sounds, even after clicking on the row. The column stops flashing, though. This may only happen with alarms preserved across sessions - I haven't had time to isolate it.

2. There's confusion with Settings->Layout checked columns for the Executions window/tab. If I check Date and Time, then OK, it adds both columns. If I go back to the Layout dialog, only Time is checked. If I uncheck Time, it removes both columns. If I go back to the Layout dialog, Time has been moved up under Vwap Time. If I check it, Time column is correctly added back. If I go back to the Settings dialog, Time is now checked, and Date has been moved above it. Logging out and back in may also add the Date column back to the form, which is the reason I noticed the inconsistency. Repeating these steps results in more variations.

3. Be able to turn off tooltips for main window button-bar buttons and column titles.

4. Put a "+" in front of positive values in the Change% column. The Change column correctly does this, but the Change% does not.

5. When you tear off a page, get rid of the tab above the column headers. The name of the page is already in the window's title bar. Every bit of screen space counts :)

6. Provide the ability to get rid of window title bars and menus. This can save a significant amount of screen space. Be able to toggle it back with a hotkey that cannot be deleted - only re-assigned.

7. Don't kill the Contract Info->Description window unless the user specifically closes it. Regardless of the setting of the "pin", this window will disappear sometimes. One specific way to cause it is to click in the Symbol column of an empty market data row, then click on the Exchange column in the same row.

8. Be able to set/preserve presence and width of Execution window Summary tab columns.

9. In Configure->View->Toolbar, multi-selecting items in the Toolbar Items listbox, and then clicking Remove, does not remove all of the selected items (only the top one). Also, if you remove several buttons, when you close the dialog, it doesn't remove some of the buttons from the right side of the bar. If you minimize the main window and restore it, though, it's correct.

10. In Configure->Hotkeys, sort the listboxes (or make them sortable if the user wants) by Description/Action.

11. Please give enough notice of mandatory upgrades to cover at least two weekends plus a Monday, and stick to the announced date (it was forced Sunday instead of the announced Monday). For example, announce on a Tuesday that a specific version will fail to work 14 days from then. This way, one can upgrade on the next weekend, and be able to roll back and get help/fixes if there are problems.
 
1) Add spike resistant alerts. Add option so that price alert will be triggered only if price exceeds alert level for x seconds

2) Sharper resolution for TWS charts -- the charts appear fuzzy to me
 
I've also requested that IB make regional quotes and routing available. I'm not a big fan of the regional exchanges, but many do offer instant execution...to balance the number of times they back away from a quote. In the end, they're somewhere between NY and Amex in quality.

In the end, we need to know that there is a regional quote or trade that we are missing or are locking above/against. The regionals are like landmines in IB's quotes and routing.

Just give us the option to exclude them in smart routing, if need be....just like Amex :p .

Quote from jimrockford:

I am pessimistic about the advice you received, to PM Def about asking IB to add access to an ECN.

I sent PMs to Def and to other IB officials, well over a year ago, asking that they automatically route orders to regional exchanges, when those regional exchanges promise certain, immediate, automatic execution at the best price, and especially when a regional is alone at the best price. My proposal would allow IB customers to sell securities at higher prices, to buy them at lower prices, and to reduce execution delays and failures. Execution can, furthermore, occasionally be enormously delayed, at great cost, when a regional is alone at the best price, you can't interact with that regional quote, the trade-thru rule will not permit execution at any other venue, and the market is rapidly trending against your position and running away from your own order. My proposal would not require any new hardware, because IB can already route to regional exchanges simply by sending orders to the regionals through ARCA or BRUT, along with appropriate routing instructions. My proposal would require only a small bit of IB programmer time, far less than that required for things like constantly upgrading charting and millions of bells and whistles. Access to regionals is also necessary, in order to comply with IB's widely advertised promise to route stock orders to the best price.

Guess what kind of response I got. Nada! Nothing! I was ignored! I got no explanation whatsoever! Perhaps IB has some excellent reason for declining my proposal, but if IB does have any reason, it has failed to make any attempt to articulate that reason.

I don't know, but I would presume that establishing connectivity to a new ECN, as you have proposed, WOULD require hardware changes, so that your proposal would be even more burdensome, and therefore less likely to succeed, than my own.

All brokers have a legal duty to get the best possible execution for their customers, but the industry's approach is generally worse than IB's. I'm not aware of any stock broker that is as good as IB, with respect to automatic order routing and execution. The stories I hear about Cybertrader, for example, depict its order-router as a pathetic joke compared to IB's.

So even though IB is the best at order execution, the IB philosophy frequently ignores order execution problems, relying on the mantra, which I have heard many times, that "you are the only one complaining". It is often not enough to show that your suggestion will drastically improve execution prices and drastically reduce execution delays and failures (I had many other suggestions which were also ignored or unreasonably rejected). You must also demonstrate that lots of other customers share your concerns. I was, for example, ignored when I reported a costly bug greatly delaying executions last spring, until well over a month later, when other customers publicly complained, and only then was the bug investigated, detected, and solved. If PMs to Def could not get mere software revisions to access regional liquidity, then I seriously doubt that they will get us new hardware adding an ECN.

I don't know, maybe IB has some reason for omitting Trackecn. Are you sure there are no unreasonable fees or other hidden costs which might justify IB's omission of TrackECN?

My suggestion is that you try to get some other customers to demonstrate their agreement with your concerns. I would think that adding a new ECN is far more important than charting or backfill or almost anything else, if it would reduce execution costs, delays, and failures. If you can show other customers really do care about your concern, then maybe your proposal will get the level of consideration it merits.
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Quote from Shreddog:

I'd like to be able to click on a bid size and get a sell order line with the size as the bid size. Comparable functionality for the ask size. Right now you get the default size, which takes time to adjust if you just want to take everything at the B/A.
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AN EXCELLENT IDEA
 
there was a good suggestion a few posts above regarding the avoidance of wasting screen space.

I just wanted to "second" that to IB.

I realize that the programmers are likely working on nice 21" monitors at 1600x1200, and on T3 lines too....but many of us trade on -laptops-....and screen-space is at a -premium-.

Along the same lines, I am concerned by the increased bloat and degradation of speed in 8.51, vs. the 8.3x era.

I've seen responses here like "just get more memory, it's cheap".

Well, the cost isn't the issue. The issue is that the power-consumption of the laptop rises dramatically when mem usage trips over each segment-mark...i.e. rolls over to 257mb.

This extra power-suck not only drains the batt faster, but heats up the machine, which turns the fan on, which drains the batt even faster.

Further, many times we're using the laptops from remote locations and -don't- have the option of even a DSL line, let alone a T3.

IB's website is a disaster on a modem, and the new 8.51 is noticeably slower than the 8.3x.

So please, IB programmers, don't assume that every -user- is running the same totally-optimum setup that you are while you're programming.

I've seen mentioned here a suggestion that IB offer a bare-bones version of TWS for those who want to avoid the feature-bloat and upgrade bugs/hassles.

I think that's an -excellent- idea. Many apps, like Netscape for example, do exactly that, as they grow in size over the years.

Strip out the charts, analytics, etc. etc. etc.; and offer ONLY the execution/api.

That would be a real winner in many clients' minds.

Despite IB still being 'best in class' in my opinion; there is no doubt that the software thing has been handled poorly; and it's just getting worse.

This latest nightmare with the forced-upgrade was handled very badly, imho.

Adding a stripped version would solve a lot of problems for many clients.
 
d9d, rumour has it that IB is moving to a modular form for TWS so hopefully in the future you will be able to customize and whittle down however you like. No idea when this will come to fuition but it strikes me as a very smart way to go. Think of it as the Mozilla of trading platforms :D
 
The problems with regional exchanges, mentioned by Mr.NBBO, like backing away from quotes, delaying execution, etc., can be eliminated by routing to regional exchanges only at those times when they are guaranteed to provide certain, immediate, automatic execution, at the best price.
 
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