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Strategies & Market Trends : E-Mini Pit -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ramus who wrote (5588)	8/20/2002 10:12:40 PM
From: the-phoenix	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11288

Walt: For six bucks a month, this at a minimum makes sense as a backup charting program, something I only sorta have now, and which every trader should have. I will definitely look into this. (So much to do!!! So little time!!!) IB is known for cheap commissions and poor customer service. They have a very robust trading platform, and offer trading in just about anything you want. And they now have a Universal account in which you can trade stocks, options and futures all from one account. One stop shopping! I originally steered away from them because I understood the Patsystems platform to be better and I don't like how IB handles stop orders, and too many horror stories about customer service. (No phone support when you really need it.) But as a backup platform/broker, I have no concerns, and I like them for stock and options trading, which is why I originally opened the account (was with Datek).

To: Ramus who wrote (5588)	8/21/2002 6:02:09 AM
From: Atin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11288

IB's API is based on a polling mechanism that makes you poll about 1/sec to get data. So it misses trades and any charts based on this data will be incomplete unlike say eSignal that sends you all trades. You will notice this sometimes even in the IB TWS Workstation when prices get "skipped". The API will also not send "duplicate" trades that happen at the same price so volume calculations will be messed up. This is fine for an order entry program like TWS that doesn't have to show each and every trade since you are trading off bids and asks anyway. But this is not fine for a charting program that needs every trade to calculate volume, show the high/low of bars etc. Also, since there is no mechanism for getting "historical" data from the IB servers, you have to do your own data collection and patching in case your computer goes down etc. Basically the IB datafeed is designed to support their order entry programs. If you don't particularly care about "exact" highs and lows on your bars you'll be fine with a charting program that uses IB's feed. Otherwise you want a more robust datafeed like eSignal that was designed to support charting applications. At best IB's data based charts can be a backup, and not a very good one at that. If you are trading real money with your charts, you should have a much more robust backup solution. -Atin