I disagree with your line of thought at several points:
* Neither Python, nor R, nor Matlab are big in systematized trading. Maybe in the retail crowd it is gaining traction but hardly any professional trading system I have ever seen is written in any of the 3 languages. Hence, there is not enough demand to consider offering an interface as broker. Maybe if Python gets further pushed and more projects come about in Python that are systematic trading related IB might consider but I see good reason why it does not offer it as of now.
Well the multibillion dollar fund I used to work at used, in the seven years I was there, used Matlab for the equity neutral system and in succession a proprietary language, S-Plus, R and Python for the futures system. So that is one data point. I know of a few other funds using Python or Matlab. R, in fairness, is less common in the institutional world.
I don't know what proportion of IB's revenue flow is retail, but it might be enough to warrant considering the retail customer.
Part of the problem might be that the demand is 'masked' since the customers using python or matlab are using a third party interface, so IB aren't aware of the real demand.
* I have never received a "15 minute delayed" message, but then I pay for my data
BTW, we are talking APIs here, any incoming data message can be handled. What is your issue here?
I also pay for my data for the markets I trade, but it is also nice to get other data eg for benchmarking and I can think of a few other reasons. But ICE / LIFFE data is $100 a month, or 2.4% of my expected annual returns (assuming a conservative SR of 0.5, rather than the unusually high realised SR so far). I think its outrageous compared to the cost of US data, especially if like me you don't need L2.
If you don't understand the issue then try and get live data for something you don't pay for, via the API. It won't work. I did some research, and it seems this is a fairly well known issue, and a lot of guys found it the single most annoying thing about using the API.
* TWS not stable? Bollocks. Here you are certainly mistaken. My gateway has been running for months without issues, and my TWS frontend (different account than the gateway) has been running stable for more than a year. I cannot remember the last time I was kicked out of a session. I usually shut down the frontend after each week and restart Monday morning Asian time zone. Mobile is also very stable nowadays, I occasionally log in from my Android mobile phone as well as tablet. No issues whatsoever.
Thats a bit strong.
No, really, on my machine(s) it is very unstable indeed. Would you like to come to my office and watch me trying to use the damnn thing?
The gateway server, I should say, is incredibly stable. I run it for weeks at a time, and occasional reboots are nearly always unrelated to IB, and have never been caused by a 'hang'.
I've no reason to make this stuff up, unless I'm perhaps working for a competitor and am secretly undermining IB, taking care to construct an entire fake identity complete with linked in profile a couple of years in advance, doing a dozen or so blog posts to encourage people to use IB, and starting my post with "Now in many ways IB are great. They have several huge plus points compared to most other brokers:", and finishing my blog post with "So please guys, I love the product, lets make it better." just to throw people off the scent....
I appreciate that you don't have the same problem, as I've no reason to disbelieve you, but perusing the internet there are plenty of people who have problems with TWS remaining stable for longer than a day, although it would appear my experience is more extreme than most. Running it for a year may even be a record (although I am confused, how do you know if you restart it weekly? Or do you restart one TWS session weekly, and leave another running the whole time?)
* "A secure ID sitting in a file on your machine"? I think you may misunderstand some security principles. The SecureID generates unique code patterns and can only be generated upon entering the SecureID login credentials. As of now the SecureID unit cannot be cloned (at least not to my knowledge) meaning there can only be one point of entry. If you copy anything to a computer that can be easily copied unless you link it to some pretty sophisticated verification/encryption/decryption hardware involved process on your machine. Can you please elaborate what bothers you? You have the choice to opt out of the secureID authentication process. Is it not simple enough? Or not complex enough?
I don't use a secureID (opted out), I use the security code card. I am wary of turning off security completely by opting out of that as well. Of course it would solve my problem, but its a workaround rather than a fix, and I'd rather not take the risk.
Right now all around the world there are trading systems talking to brokers systems, the latter of which trust that the former is who they say they are. I doubt they are all using sophisticated physical hardware based authentication, or requiring manual intervention every time a connection is re-established.
If someone hacks into my system so they can steal a digital authentication file (for which they'd need to get root), well they could do as much damage (trade on my behalf basically) with the existing security system if they got root assuming a server was already running.
If a file based authentication was used then the existing security could be retained for account management, so nobody could transfer cash out of my account.
* The frontend is hardly bloated. I do not see much content that appears unnecessary. Serving a frontend that lets you trade pretty much all asset classes and dozens of markets worldwide is a tall order and I think IB solved it in a very sophisticated way.
Well as I said, TWS doesn't run on my machine, which on paper at least has the spec to run it. The most charitable interpretation of this is that there is too much feature and its overloading the machine (the alternative is that its buggy - and as plenty of other people can use it this probably isn't a problem). This may also be a platform specific issue.
I don't dispute the need for a fully featured front end, which you might need a more powerful machine to run on. It's just that I don't need it, and I'd like a simpler alternative which will run without hanging.
