Open Letter to Interactive Brokers

virgin · Mar 24, 2007

Any figures on IB uptime ?

atticus · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from HoundDogOne:

SO IT JUST CANNOT HAPPEN.

Morgan Stanley doesn't service the serious trader with $100k to $5mm, IB does. MS doesn't want your business, and you shouldn't want theirs.

IB competes against TD-Waterhouse, Option Express and the like. Yes, they're acceptably-competent for the small LLC, which is more than can be said for any other broker in the retail space.

MajorUrsa · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from atticus:

Morgan Stanley doesn't service the serious trader with $100k to $5mm, IB does. MS doesn't want your business, and you shouldn't want theirs.

IB competes against TD-Waterhouse, Option Express and the like. Yes, they're acceptably-competent for the small LLC, which is more than can be said for any other broker in the retail space.

I agree completely. The openness and versatility of their platform AND their business model is a refreshing change to the standard heavyhanded US model. If firms like this can exist there is still hope for the captalist model. I sincerely hope they will not sell their soul and go the 'coporate world' way.

Ursa..

SideShowBob · Mar 24, 2007

I used TD Waterhouse a few years ago. Mutual fund trading was fine but without fail I got poor to borderline criminal fills on my trades. I did much better with stock trades at Scottrade but they lost two separate mutual fund orders I placed. After the first one I thought maybe I had't submitted it or something -- but after the second I was sure I placed it and it disappeared overnight.

I guess every broker has their issues....

Shreddog · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from syswizard:

Look guys, based on my experience with them and their API (also roundly criticized I might add !),

I'm not too pleased with IB lately, but their API is bad? Not in my mind. I haven't found a better one. It's by far the easiest for me to bring up a new automated trading system on. Not trying to call you out, but I'd love to hear of some alternatives that you think are better. I'm sure it all depends on what you're trying to do, but for me, IB's API is very good. It's by far the best documented and supported I've come across.

syswizard · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from SideShowBob:
I guess every broker has their issues.... [/B]

Oh, I love that quote above. Get this: I'm with a great brokerage, best people, always listening, very responsive in that regard, platform is solid, but listen to this: Daily bar charts are "broken" in the sense that Volume is not reported for every day. I mentioned it 8 weeks ago. No action. They just rolled-out a new service release. STILL wasn't fixed ! Response: low priority, other issues more urgent. I mean JEEZ, I could get the same chart FREE from Yahoo or some other web-based charting service. This is basic "stuff".

Some day, someone will be able to do it all:
1) low commish
2) great responsiveness
3) attention-to-detail
4) fast technical fixes
5) solid platform - never goes down.

Who will it be ?

syswizard · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from Shreddog:

I'm not too pleased with IB lately, but their API is bad? Not in my mind. I haven't found a better one. It's by far the easiest for me to bring up a new automated trading system on. Not trying to call you out, but I'd love to hear of some alternatives that you think are better. I'm sure it all depends on what you're trying to do, but for me, IB's API is very good. It's by far the best documented and supported I've come across.

Really ? I'm ready to hire you Dude ! See below from API forums: The confusion over the reqIDs method alone is "telling" . These posts are within the last 4 months.

Thank you, Richard, for your detailed explanation. But I can't understand what means notice below if IB doesn't fix such obvious problems.
And I can't understand why I have to spent my time to figure out how API works because the documentation doesn't provide correct description and in general it's wrong concerning some points.
And I can say there is no logic in some places of API.
Richard, I'v never read that I can have only 8 connections. Could you point me where I may read about this restriction?
And I think if every user sends e-mails to IB, they have to take measures to fix the problems.
I've been developing applications using IB API since 2004 (but them were as auxiliary and additional or training trading algorithm and I haven't given a lot of attention to such problems I tried to find any solutions without any help) but now I was involved in a serious project and I don't want to spent my time figuring out why API doesn't work how it must work (according to the documentation).

The API documentation is very poor. It always has been. Dozens of people have complained about it over the years, and nothing ever gets done about it.

So to use the API successfully, you have to take a pragmatic approach. If you make an assumption about how you think the API should work (based on the documentation), you should test it out to discover if that assumption is correct. If you find it isn't correct, you just have to work with the api as it is - complaining that it doesn't work as documented never seems to produce any change.

In your case, you're assuming that the numIds argument to reqIds is supposed to have some effect, but as my posts on Jun 17 and June 26 in this thread point out, it has no effect whatsoever. nextValidId always returns the next id after that latest one actually used.

I would say there definitely aren't any problems with ids in the API, but there definitely are problems with the documentation. So use the documentation as a guide, but try things out to discover the reality.

By the way, are you aware that you can only have a maximum of 8 concurrent API connections? Using a separate connection for each instrument is not scalable.

As to whether openOrder fires just for orders which were placed from this client, why not just try it and see? Using the sample program provided by IB and the paper trading system it's very easy to try this sort of thing, and you'll learn a lot more than reading the documentation.

Shreddog · Mar 24, 2007

Quote from syswizard:

Really ? I'm ready to hire you Dude ! See below from API forums: The confusion over the reqIDs method alone is "telling" . These posts are within the last 4 months.

I never said they don't have problems, but in my experience the others are far worse. You didn't suggest anyone better.....

Take Sterling for example. You can't even do something so basic as to modify an ECN order through their API. Documentation is just a few pages and doesn't even list the coniditions under which a specific event will fire. Programming examples are years old and written in VB6. And support? It's the secretary! His job is to make sure that you never get to talk to someone who programmed the API. You can't even get an email address. Compared to that IB looks platinum level in my book.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I get to pay $200/month for this!

My experience with broker API's is everybody loves to write them, nobody wants to support or document them. IB has a least made the effort.

Fishbird · Mar 24, 2007

I gave up the fight with autotrading on IB about a year ago.
Now i do EOD/EOW trading doing 20 - 40 trades a year.
If something screws up i dont care and try to log in tomorrow or next week.

Funnily i make more money this way and have loooots of free time. In fact i could easily work and generate a second income. But i prever going fishing.
Havent had a trade for about six weeks now .
Also dont really know what this thread is about

trefoil · Mar 24, 2007

I do about 5-10 trades a month, don't need an API capable of handling automated trading, but I do keep a large margin balance relative to my actual cash a lot of the time, so margin rates are important to me.
My balance is less than 100k. I looked on IB's site and couldn't figure out what my margin interest would be, although it looks like it would be less than what I'm paying now. Can someone tell me?