TWS Scrapper

T

tonyf

After searching for months, I am unable to find [initial] margin requirements by security (i.e. at the security level) anywhere besides right clicking on every security in TWS / Show Margin Impact.

No reports whatsoever and nothing in Risk Navigator. Impossible to get anything in the excel APIs as well.

I am now collecting this manually every day but it is a demanding job. Is there an easier automated way to scrap TWS in the same way I am doing now using a task processor of some sort?
 
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Problem is that it compares to existing positions such as spread relationships. Not exactly "initial" requirements, but initial for that trade your contemplating.
 
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xandman said:
View attachment 283926

Problem is that it compares to existing positions such as spread relationships. Not exactly "initial" requirements, but initial for that trade your contemplating.
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Yes, this is offered with the "What-if" module in the standard api spreadsheet.

But those calcs relating to adding a new position (or adding/reducing current holdings) versus measuring the impact of existing holding to the overall margin requirements.
 
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Couldn't IB just add a new column which lists the margin requirement for each position? Or rather the "delta" for adding or removing one unit of a position? For example, if I have 10 units of something, stock, option, etc. How does my margin requirement change by removing or adding 1 unit of that? So if I wanted to free up margin for another trade, I can quickly sort and see what's using the most margin. Another column which shows margin requirement / premium of option would be useful as well.
 
nooby_mcnoob said:
IB TWS is decent for being written by interns in India, but if you really want the good stuff you need to use the API.
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I suspect the other issue IB runs into is the requirement to support backward compatibility. They can't simply come out with an all-new TWS built from scratch, drop support for the old version, and then force everyone to immediately adopt it. If they were going to do that, they would have to build a parallel infrastructure to support both platforms for a while until people move over to the new platform. They also face a lot of risk with making changes. If there was a bug that affected order quantities for example... I think I see this with the API. Some design decisions were made early on that simply did not age well. That said, the API works well enough for how I use it. I'm curious about how it compares to the ToS API in terms of speed. I suspect pulling option chains is much faster with ToS.
 
ET180 said:
I suspect the other issue IB runs into is the requirement to support backward compatibility. They can't simply come out with an all-new TWS built from scratch, drop support for the old version, and then force everyone to immediately adopt it. If they were going to do that, they would have to build a parallel infrastructure to support both platforms for a while until people move over to the new platform. They also face a lot of risk with making changes. If there was a bug that affected order quantities for example... I think I see this with the API. Some design decisions were made early on that simply did not age well. That said, the API works well enough for how I use it. I'm curious about how it compares to the ToS API in terms of speed. I suspect pulling option chains is much faster with ToS.
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As someone in software who has seen more than one parallel product being created, this isn't hard. I suspect they don't believe there will be any benefit to the bottom line by "fixing" all the warts in TWS.

As it stands, TWS is pretty OK, even though it is a dumpster fire in terms of modern software. It's a 90s screen trader's cockpit.

For example, consider the F-15 cockpit:

F-15_Eagle_Cockpit.jpg


vs the F-35 cockpit:

z9tejhhbg6931.jpg


Which one would you _really_ trust when flying it...
 
There is no such thing as the margin of a position. There is a portfolio margin. You can measure an impact on an existing portfolio and it could be different for different portfolios.
 
ids said:
There is no such thing as the margin of a position. There is a portfolio margin. You can measure an impact on an existing portfolio and it could be different for different portfolios.
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You can look at margin requirements by position. That's what I meant. For portfolio margin, the margin requirements of each position will depend on what other positions you have in your portfolio. For RegT, it will be based only on the position.
 
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