SSF Trading with IB's TWS

B

Bankedout

Hopefully Hio or somebody else who is familiar with these instruments can provide some clarity here.

I want to trade a single stock future, but I want my orders to trigger when the underlying moves in price. To do this I think I would make a conditional order. As an example:

I want to sell XYZ's SSF June contract if XYZ's stock trades below $$$

I would make a market order to sell XYZ's SSF in TWS. Then right click on that order and "Make Conditional..." Telling IB's servers that if XYZ trades at or below $$$ by my trigger method, my sell market order on the SSF should be executed.

Does that sound right? I have heard that works for options.

Then if I wanted the conditional order to perform like a sell stop limit, I could create another condition "AND" XYZ must be no lower than $$$ in price.

Once that is done I could attach an auto stop to cover my position if XYZ rises to a certain price. Right click on market sell order and select "attach auto stop". Change that order to a market order to buy the SSF, and make that conditional to the stock price.

Does this make sense? I guess I could try it out with one of the cheap SSFs and see what happens. I would rather hear from someone who has done this before though.

Thanks in advance,

Banker
 
It might not be worth all the effort, since the SSF follow the underlying stock prices so closely. Might be simpler just to set your order prices based on the stock prices you were going to use to trigger the orders, and just add a couple cents to it.

Anyhow, I bet you could try all these order types out on the Demo.
 
Thanks for responding. My concern is that if the SSF isn't trading often, the stops might not trigger at the exact places where I want them to. I suppose I could do the double bid/ask trigger method, but I really like double last for my trading. Maybe I will try out the demo version for testing my order ideas, thanks for the tip.

Are NQLX and OneChicago still experiencing outages with IB pretty often? Which one is more reliable?

Thanks again,

Banker
 
Oh yeah, I didn't think of that. You should be able to make it conditional on the stock's price triggers

I think OneChicago has gotten better than they were at the beginning. I suppose NQLX is slightly more reliable.
 
Steve at IB confirmed the availability of doing what I want over on the Retail Firms forum. It's pretty neat. You can use these orders on options too. If you shorted the DIA SSF, you could have your buy to cover trigger off of the Dow Jones Industrial Average value if you wanted. Or you could trigger on DIA trading at or above a certain level or even the Mini Dow futures contract.

Conditional orders are worth taking a look at, in my opinion.

Banker
 
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