Interactive Brokers vs. Preferred Trade
- Thread starter bouncer
- Start date
here's the latest in my efforts to place orders smoothly with IB.
Bottom line, IB is kicking ass (ie, doing great)
I have discovered that one of my machines (the one I had been running IB on) has some sort of serious memory managemeent problem, despite having 256K ram and a 500mHz processor. The other machine doesn't. For some reason the processor is constantly working, even when it appears nothing is being done. I am all-but-certain that is why the IB software wasn't working well, and for that matter, my tradescape software, and other software, as well.
Today I had my smoothest day ever with IB. it was a delight. If i got a buy signal, I would hit my hot key and immediately the "buy line" would be cued up. I would hit another hot key to toggle the price up and down in units of 0.01 or 0.04 per key press--you have your choice. A click of the mouse pulled down a menu so I could choose how to route the order (if I didn't want to route it by the prior-selected user-chosen route, which for me is usually island). IB's performance was slick and very fast. Yet another pair of hot keys allowed me to choose the number of shares i wnated to buy or sell by toggling up or down in increments of 100 shares.
I found myself not timid about pulling quick buy-sell manuevers, whereas before I would shy away from transactions requiring lots of quickness.
There are other nice features to IB which I won't go into in this post.
I am someone who had significant troubles getting a good experience from the IB software, and has been able to find a way to make it work well, at least for now. I encourage others having problems to hang in there.
blackjack
Bottom line, IB is kicking ass (ie, doing great)
I have discovered that one of my machines (the one I had been running IB on) has some sort of serious memory managemeent problem, despite having 256K ram and a 500mHz processor. The other machine doesn't. For some reason the processor is constantly working, even when it appears nothing is being done. I am all-but-certain that is why the IB software wasn't working well, and for that matter, my tradescape software, and other software, as well.
Today I had my smoothest day ever with IB. it was a delight. If i got a buy signal, I would hit my hot key and immediately the "buy line" would be cued up. I would hit another hot key to toggle the price up and down in units of 0.01 or 0.04 per key press--you have your choice. A click of the mouse pulled down a menu so I could choose how to route the order (if I didn't want to route it by the prior-selected user-chosen route, which for me is usually island). IB's performance was slick and very fast. Yet another pair of hot keys allowed me to choose the number of shares i wnated to buy or sell by toggling up or down in increments of 100 shares.
I found myself not timid about pulling quick buy-sell manuevers, whereas before I would shy away from transactions requiring lots of quickness.
There are other nice features to IB which I won't go into in this post.
I am someone who had significant troubles getting a good experience from the IB software, and has been able to find a way to make it work well, at least for now. I encourage others having problems to hang in there.
blackjack
hey guys, either you know trading or you know trading, but in some cases you know both trading and technology, and while I totally appreciated your review of IB, you don't know jack about what you were talking about.
I'm running into significant performance issues with WinME and it's the absolute worst OptSys I've had since Win3.x days. Upgrade over the weekend, after doing extensive pretests and checking with your OEM for BIOS and Driver updates, is my only advise.
Your description between IB's software is mutually exclusive to calling up MS IE, Netscape or Operasoftware as a browser and requesting their portal (i.e. http://www.----.com), which will undoubtedly be a "Java class" program (running within a browser). Either you did one or the other, but not a combination of both. By your description, the browser would logically be highly cluncky (to use your technical term), because "ack" (acknowledgement) of every mouse change or hotkey would include a transmission, process and reply transmission step. That's why you shut down other tasks and use almost exclusively, the DirectAccess broker's software on one machine.
256mb used to be doubly plenty, now its a walk in the park at noon time, hence crowded. I read where 192mb per screen is recommended, especially if you use 2 monitors, or use a trading chat room through a browser and the DA's software.
What were the other features that you admired? Can you explain the OCO (one cancels the other) where by you set a topside profit limit order AND a stop limit/stop loss order and whichever executes also cancels the other? I would like to hear more about this.
Also, when you straddle the market, are you hour trading or scalping (minute trading)? as these orders take a while to setup.
I'm running into significant performance issues with WinME and it's the absolute worst OptSys I've had since Win3.x days. Upgrade over the weekend, after doing extensive pretests and checking with your OEM for BIOS and Driver updates, is my only advise.
Your description between IB's software is mutually exclusive to calling up MS IE, Netscape or Operasoftware as a browser and requesting their portal (i.e. http://www.----.com), which will undoubtedly be a "Java class" program (running within a browser). Either you did one or the other, but not a combination of both. By your description, the browser would logically be highly cluncky (to use your technical term), because "ack" (acknowledgement) of every mouse change or hotkey would include a transmission, process and reply transmission step. That's why you shut down other tasks and use almost exclusively, the DirectAccess broker's software on one machine.
256mb used to be doubly plenty, now its a walk in the park at noon time, hence crowded. I read where 192mb per screen is recommended, especially if you use 2 monitors, or use a trading chat room through a browser and the DA's software.
What were the other features that you admired? Can you explain the OCO (one cancels the other) where by you set a topside profit limit order AND a stop limit/stop loss order and whichever executes also cancels the other? I would like to hear more about this.
Also, when you straddle the market, are you hour trading or scalping (minute trading)? as these orders take a while to setup.
Today was my first day on IB also..
Lightning fast (using best_ecn).. Good fills..
I've noticed that if I get filled immediately,
it usually means I'm going to lose on the
trade.
HotKeys _rule_.
Lightning fast (using best_ecn).. Good fills..
I've noticed that if I get filled immediately,
it usually means I'm going to lose on the
trade.
HotKeys _rule_.yk- regards option fills: I have been trading options (primarily OEX) with IB for over a year. In my experience IB does a very good job but the exchange(CBOE) has become worse and worse. The "new" 15 second delay rules and frequently shutting down auto execution usually mean that you will not get anything close to an "instant fill".