stevet: âThe amount of slippage you get is not to do with the trading platform, but is to do with the broker or clearerâ¦â
Exactly my point, regarding slippage.
IB holds orders on its servers, transmitting those orders only when the market trades to your election, rather than transmitting them immediately, where they are held on the CME servers, as some brokers offer. IB orders are, therefore, placed in the back of the queue behind any other preexisting locally held orders at the time of transmission. IMHO, you chances of receiving a poor fill increase with IBâs current method of order handling in direct proportion to the size of your order and the currently available counter-trade liquidity.
The intention is that my setups are coincident with market reversals or continuations in my favor, which are marked by reduced counter-trade buyer/seller activity relative to pro-trade buyer/seller activity. I find that I will often receive poor or no fills when waiting in the back of the line behind those traders that have the capacity to absorb much of the available liquidity at my election by placing resting orders directly on the Globex servers long before my order has been transmitted.
In practical terms, this meant that if I received decent fills I would almost always be traded through by a few points at minimum and if I was trying to pick up contracts at what later had been a significant turning point or launching point I would receive horrible fills or no fill at all, depending on the type of order.
I would literally watch, time and again, the market trade in excess of 100 contracts at my election/limit and I would not receive a fill. I donât have this problem any longer.
âsurely no one is trying to trade off the quotes on IB or any other electronic platformâ
While I donât use J-Trader quotes to trade with exclusively, I have found its quotes to be more reliable, during certain market occurrences, then the quotes I get from either of my data providers.