Stop Market orders executing very slowly on platform

[Space Alchemist]

I would really appreciate the community's thoughts on this situation, here are my concerns:

1. I'm experiencing many very slow stop market executions on Trade Station. I understand Tradestation is also using InteractiveBrokers on the back-end. Not entirely sure if this is a TS or IB issue. I also see posts here going back as far as 10-20 years expressing this same issue with IB.

2. TS support (which I've heard may overlap with IB support?) seems to be generally not very concerned or knowledgeable about technical errors in their UI. They seem to come up with obfuscated excuses anytime an error occurs. Emails and telephone calls are generally not returned. Overall sense of apathy.

3. I'm placing trades on CME futures contracts. There is plenty of trading volume. I'm watching the whole time. As soon as the price is equal to the stop market, about 20% of the time nothing happens. If I just wait, the stop may eventually execute around 30 second to 3 minutes later. If I manually get out without first cancelling the stop loss, the stop loss then immediately executes. Whenever I manually get out, the trade happens instantly.

4. I have a serious concern about this, as I've lost as much as $50-$100 on individual small trades due to these execution delays, and am doing about 100 trades per month. I'm also concerned with these issues, that perhaps sometime a stop market may fail to execute at all. If I fail to get resolution from TS soon, I will soon be looking at other platforms and would welcome suggestions for stronger platforms from the community.

5. I'm wondering if this is simply an error or is actually a hidden profit center for the platform, where they front-run our stop orders in such a way that they can make significant profit each time with zero risk to them and they are passing it off as due to "market conditions" or some other excuse and just basically tell people to live with it.

 

[danielc1]

If you are trading futures like th es, nq, russel, it should be almost an instant fill as soon the stop trigger is hit. Like under one second or something like that.

 

[Space Alchemist]

Yes, the strange thing is, with all of these, if I close it out manually the execution is always instantly. However, the stop market order executes very slowly about 20% of the time, 100% of the time not in my favor. So this makes it seem suspicious. I'm trading CME E-Mini silver, and CME mini grain contracts primarily.

 

[Bad_Badness]

Sounds like shenanigans on the order routing and fill. On one hand, who really cares what is really happening. Any explanation is suspect and might change because TS will be opaque, as you point out. On the other hand, it is happening and costing.

So you have a choice:
1) change your tactics so you avoid it.
2) change your broker-platform-routing so you avoid it.
3) live with it and ponder who-why-what-when ad nauseum.

I used to use TS a long time ago. I went back to IB because although there are less features in the trading platform, the executions are more consistent at IB, especially in fast markets. I am sure there are better executions than IB for futures with a dedicated futures broker-platform. But at least I get reasonable, predictable fills for my tactics, which is meets my minimum bar.