Why isn't IB up here defending themselves?

[tommcginnis]

Whatcha need there is a G.F.L.A.W.H.* to shorten the distance to a globally reasonable amount.
I have opened a ticket on it.
Purdue, MIT, and CERN are collaborating.
Should be good. IB should take note.


* Glass-Fiber Local-Area Worm Hole

 

[d08]

Security. I am handling MONEY with my computers. WinDOHs is an inherently insecure OS. It is closed source. It has a gigantic back door built right in to the system. It has an ineffective user/file privilege system. It requires drivers to use practically any piece of hardware you hook up to it. It is for profit, run by a predatory juggernaut of a company that uses bullying tactics on PC makers and vendors to ensure that even if you don't use their OS, you have to pay for it anyway. It uses a huge chunk of that money to pay for the advertising that they use to brainwash the people who pay for it. When Windows 8 came out I decided I had no more use for WinDOHs and besides I was sick and tired of dealing with all the antivirus, antimalware needed to use it, and the how vulnerable even a properly protected WinDOHs system is. The biggest most dangerous hacker to your Windoze system is Microsoft. They reserve the absolute right to do anything they want to your system whenever they want for any reason that suits them with or without your permission or even notifying you. It is in the EULA. Read it. Even Mac is more secure.

Most distributions of Linux do not even have a root account by default. Instead you use the sudo command. If a piece of code or an attacker cannot get to root, there isn't very much that they can do to your system. Good passwording and the built in encryption, combined with a bit of sensible computing pretty much ensure that your Linux machine will not be a money funnel from you to someone else. That other OS is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Linux is more flexible, and more powerful. It is open source. That might sound like a bad thing but it is actually a very very very very very good thing, security wise. Security through obscurity is a total fallacy. Open source enables anyone to examine and experiment with the source code, and help make it more secure, more usable, more powerful. Every user is a potential developer, if he has the skill set and the inclination. Talking about a superior OS that is free. Ever wonder why Linux has so little (basically, none) advertising? Cause there is no revenue stream to tap for it. A few companies on the fringe make money, mostly through tech support and implementation, but Linux itself is free. The few paid distributions are even free, you just don't get the support package or the closed source 3rd party addons.

It's not about being on Team Linux. It is about having a better and more secure operating system instead of paying for an inferior, even dangerous one.

So why don't I switch to WinDOHs? Because I can't, if I want to enjoy reasonably secure computing. Plus I don't want to support Microsoft's robber baron business model.

I used Windows from 3.0 up through W98, XP and W7. MSDOS before that. Briefly switched through Linux which at the time was still a bit too geeky for me, OS/2 Warp, which IBM dropped support for just when it was starting to get really popular, BEOS, which never amounted to much, and ended up back with Windows. Skipped over ME and Vista, for sucking so badly. Then W8 came out and enough was enough. They justified an upgraded version by changing stuff that didn't need to be changed, but did basically nothing to improve the system and secure it. W10 I am sure is no better. I wouldn't know. You can keep W12 when it comes out, too. There will be no W11, probably because it already sucks too badly. There is only one way I would ever switch back to Windows, and that is if they went open source and developed a system that was better than Linux. Fat chance.

And when you do automated trading, Linux is the only serious OS to go with. I'm using Windows 10 as my day-to-day but it's probably the last Windows I'll ever be using. The only reason is if you do any kind of gaming, which I did in the past.

 

[d08]

Matt said about latency...is IB doing something about improving on latency, quality of datafeed? Everyone on the net has complained about it...To add to the problems, say someone trading in Mumbai on NSE Mumbai Exchange (India), his IB server is located in Hong Kong....

IB won't have servers in every country especially considering that India probably isn't a big market for them. For traders concerned with 150ms or less of added latency, they should definitely only rely on colocation. IB only has one server location in Europe despite having probably 20-30 as many customers from EU compared to India.

Also, cables are not laid directly so your map doesn't make much sense.

 

[def]

Matt said about latency...is IB doing something about improving on latency, quality of datafeed? Everyone on the net has complained about it...To add to the problems, say someone trading in Mumbai on NSE Mumbai Exchange (India), his IB server is located in Hong Kong....

Again an "everyone". Distance does matter and there a cost benefit consideration to putting credit check modules and client server farms in every exchange we offer. For me, latency to the HK servers is pretty good at 2ms, 210ms on average to the US servers, and to be lazy, to nse.com (I didn't want to look up our server IP address at NSE) 162 ms. For anyone without the ability to co-locate to markets around the world, this is still faster than the blink of any eye.

For the datafeed, there is no measurable latency to the human eye. We do indeed provide snapshot data which occurs several times per second (and faster than the blink of any eye) to optimize bandwidth. However, it is important to note on the server level, the data is streaming and in most cases a direct feed from the exchange itself. (ie. if you run a stop it will be triggered based on the server level data).

You are obviously in India. While our access to the exchange is colocated, at this point the economics and structural issues such as incoming telco reliability, don't make sense to put the client level infrastructure in place. If you are trading other markets from India, you can ask to move the the US, European or HK server farms. So if you are trading US more actively, that could make sense.

 

[El_Cubano]

Again an "everyone". Distance does matter and there a cost benefit consideration to putting credit check modules and client server farms in every exchange we offer. For me, latency to the HK servers is pretty good at 2ms, 210ms on average to the US servers, and to be lazy, to nse.com (I didn't want to look up our server IP address at NSE) 162 ms. For anyone without the ability to co-locate to markets around the world, this is still faster than the blink of any eye.

For the datafeed, there is no measurable latency to the human eye. We do indeed provide snapshot data which occurs several times per second (and faster than the blink of any eye) to optimize bandwidth. However, it is important to note on the server level, the data is streaming and in most cases a direct feed from the exchange itself. (ie. if you run a stop it will be triggered based on the server level data).

You are obviously in India. While our access to the exchange is colocated, at this point the economics and structural issues such as incoming telco reliability, don't make sense to put the client level infrastructure in place. If you are trading other markets from India, you can ask to move the the US, European or HK server farms. So if you are trading US more actively, that could make sense.

There are data feed issues as far as charts loading and updating in a timely manner. Experienced it again this morning with charts hanging and and slowly loading (or not loading at all) certain time frames.

 

[rvdesh]

IB won't have servers in every country especially considering that India probably isn't a big market for them. For traders concerned with 150ms or less of added latency, they should definitely only rely on colocation. IB only has one server location in Europe despite having probably 20-30 as many customers from EU compared to India.

Also, cables are not laid directly so your map doesn't make much sense.

Agreed, it makes economic sense for big markets.
It is understood cables are not laid straight, that adds to additional few milliseconds!!
With a delay of 300ms plus(two way) , order fill rate of limit orders is very poor. This is obvious when I see stop orders are filled well before the same last traded price comes on TWS screen!!

 

[themickey]

Here's some news out today....

..........Australia: The corporate regulator is preparing to use new intervention powers for the first time to block or restrict the sale of two exotic financial products that have burned unsuspecting mum and dad investors.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is looking to ban the sale of binary options, which are often sold through websites run by boiler room style operations offshore in low governance jurisdictions like Belize and the Seychelles. It is also looking to restrict the sale of Contracts for Difference - more commonly known as CFDs - to retail clients.
ASIC on Thursday released a consultation paper about its use of its product intervention powers to address what it said was "significant detriment to retail clients resulting from over-the-counter (OTC) binary options and CFDs".

Any restrictions put in place by ASIC will have an impact on local providers of the products including CMC Markets, IG Markets and Interactive Brokers.......
https://www.smh.com.au/business/mar...fds-for-retail-investors-20190822-p52jky.html

 

[rvdesh]

Again an "everyone". Distance does matter and there a cost benefit consideration to putting credit check modules and client server farms in every exchange we offer. For me, latency to the HK servers is pretty good at 2ms, 210ms on average to the US servers, and to be lazy, to nse.com (I didn't want to look up our server IP address at NSE) 162 ms. For anyone without the ability to co-locate to markets around the world, this is still faster than the blink of any eye.

For the datafeed, there is no measurable latency to the human eye. We do indeed provide snapshot data which occurs several times per second (and faster than the blink of any eye) to optimize bandwidth. However, it is important to note on the server level, the data is streaming and in most cases a direct feed from the exchange itself. (ie. if you run a stop it will be triggered based on the server level data).

You are obviously in India. While our access to the exchange is colocated, at this point the economics and structural issues such as incoming telco reliability, don't make sense to put the client level infrastructure in place. If you are trading other markets from India, you can ask to move the the US, European or HK server farms. So if you are trading US more actively, that could make sense.

Your information is useful to make the most out of given constraints...changing my order types. Now placing stop-limit orders instead of placing limit order on crossing price threshold. Thanks for that. Request if IB Can do something about improving quality and speed of datafeed, increasing requests per second ...

 

[def]

Here's some news out today....

..........Australia: The corporate regulator is preparing to use new intervention powers for the first time to block or restrict the sale of two exotic financial products that have burned unsuspecting mum and dad investors.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is looking to ban the sale of binary options, which are often sold through websites run by boiler room style operations offshore in low governance jurisdictions like Belize and the Seychelles. It is also looking to restrict the sale of Contracts for Difference - more commonly known as CFDs - to retail clients.
ASIC on Thursday released a consultation paper about its use of its product intervention powers to address what it said was "significant detriment to retail clients resulting from over-the-counter (OTC) binary options and CFDs".

Any restrictions put in place by ASIC will have an impact on local providers of the products including CMC Markets, IG Markets and Interactive Brokers.......
https://www.smh.com.au/business/mar...fds-for-retail-investors-20190822-p52jky.html

Interesting to see we are mentioned by the author of the article as any press is good press but if he really did his homework and read the consult he would see that we satisfy all the margin provisions of the proposal and known we offer a transparent and fair product.

I like to think of the IB CFD product as more of a market access type/institutional swap product that is essentially just a back to back transaction on an exchange. Our clients have the ability to add quotes to the exchange book in the same way they would trading stocks. This is possible because IB will match all CFD orders immediately with a hedge-order. As a result a non-marketable CFD order will create a matching non-marketable order for the underlying share on the exchange.

https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/en/index.php?f=39284 for further details.

The real issue here is that Australia and other markets have had problems with CFDs as they were largely unregulated and there are instances of firms offering product dubious in nature. FX rec'd a similar bad name and many of the cowboys had to change their model. In that regard, I am glad they are putting in measures that at first glance seem reasonable and will have minimal, if any, impact on our current product.

 

[isc1746]

That's not true as we do not look at it that way. While we do indeed have many sizeable accounts, there are many many thousands of accounts that are very active with far less capital. The $ size of an account does not necessarily determine its value or classification.

To put another spin on it, there are numerous very large AUM accounts at Interactive Brokers which start off with as little as $10,000 to test the waters for a follow up transfer in or deposit of assets or lead to the opening of an institutional account for their firm or the fund for which they work.

I think he meant it as a positive comment. IB is usually thought of as a serious broker, first to allow APIs. Newbies may say the TWS is too complicated, so I tell them they are not ready for IB, as it is for serious traders/investors. All meant as positive, and thank you very much for participating in these threads.