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Interactive Brokers Cheap but the Fills Suck


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Interactive Brokers Cheap but the Fills Suck

  #1 (permalink)
 tr3nt 
Arlington
 
Experience: Beginner
Platform: ninjatrader
Posts: 27 since Jul 2009
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Today I ended my swing trade of $NOV that netted me about 180 bucks....I put in my limit order for 31.91 and IB ended up filling me at 31.81 and this stock does not move that fast at all. This is why it sucks to have a market maker as your broker..never had that issue with thinkorswim but had to pay way to much for roundtrips....

Anyone else get horrible fills ON LIMIT orders from IB?


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  #2 (permalink)
Maletor
Boston
 
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Stop orders are the only orders that can possibly have slippage.

Limit orders are guaranteed to be at the price you ask for or better. That's why they are limit orders.

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  #3 (permalink)
 
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 Big Mike 
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If you are using a different data feed than your broker then you can experience this type of thing. For a while, I used IQfeed for data and IB for broker, and always got bad fills that didn't match the data. Funny how it never works out to be a better fill.

But I agree with Maletor, if you are only using IB for data+broker and placed a limit order, then you should fight it. Presumably it is easy to prove your limit order amount, date/time, and what it was filled at. You can fight it but you usually only have 24-72 hours or something to do it, so get a move on.

Mike

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  #4 (permalink)
 tr3nt 
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I am going to call them up and see what the heck their problem is! thanks for the sage advice!

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  #5 (permalink)
tortexal
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DO NOT rely on IBs data feed it is insanely inaccurate. This is the reason for your crappy fills. I use barchart.com for stocks (its cheap 55/mo) and run strats off that, my fills no longer suck. ex, stock will be printing @ hod 6-7 100 lots, IB will be 4 cents under!!! Stuff that actually prints, IB will simply ignore

edit: as fate may have it, i just shut down my Ib account and moving everything over to trade station. dumping NT as well

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  #6 (permalink)
 
sefstrat's Avatar
 sefstrat 
Austin, TX
 
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tortexal View Post
DO NOT rely on IBs data feed it is insanely inaccurate. This is the reason for your crappy fills. I use barchart.com for stocks (its cheap 55/mo) and run strats off that, my fills no longer suck. ex, stock will be printing @ hod 6-7 100 lots, IB will be 4 cents under!!! Stuff that actually prints, IB will simply ignore

edit: as fate may have it, i just shut down my Ib account and moving everything over to trade station. dumping NT as well


Tortexal, I am curious what pushed you over the edge to make you cancel your IB account so suddenly =)

I used to think IB's Forex feed was awful until I tried a bunch of other brokers, surprisingly many of them (including NT/GAIN feed and IQFeed Barclays) are much worse than IB. Of course IB still has the issue of no historical tick data, which is a nuisance.. but I am willing to live with it since their spreads/commissions are some of the lowest out there. Never had a problem with fills either.

For futures trading there is no question that ZenFire leaves IB in the dust in every respect, I wouldn't even consider trading futures through IB.

Its too bad really, IMO IB could be a really great broker if they'd get their shit together on a few issues like their POS java client and the tick data thing. There is definitely something to be said for the ability to trade basically anything from a single account.

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  #7 (permalink)
tortexal
Panama!
 
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sefstrat View Post
Tortexal, I am curious what pushed you over the edge to make you cancel your IB account so suddenly =)

I used to think IB's Forex feed was awful until I tried a bunch of other brokers, surprisingly many of them (including NT/GAIN feed and IQFeed Barclays) are much worse than IB. Of course IB still has the issue of no historical tick data, which is a nuisance.. but I am willing to live with it since their spreads/commissions are some of the lowest out there. Never had a problem with fills either.

For futures trading there is no question that ZenFire leaves IB in the dust in every respect, I wouldn't even consider trading futures through IB.

Its too bad really, IMO IB could be a really great broker if they'd get their shit together on a few issues like their POS java client and the tick data thing. There is definitely something to be said for the ability to trade basically anything from a single account.

Sure couple of things, I originally went with IB for access to hard to borrow stocks to short, a plus was their cheap comish. right away i noticed terrible fills and attributed it to their MM TMBR just screwing me over so i switched everything to lmt orders. no big deal, TMBR was just trading against me (i later found this not to be the case) strike 1

Meanwhile i was shopping around for an FX broker. IB was on the list since they are an ecn and i wasn't about to open an acc w/ a MM. i traded w IBFX a bit and then had an erroneous trade for 35,000,000 usd/jpy which cost me some $$ that IB was not willing to reverse. eventually i found someone who would, the trade was a bug in TWS that i offered to recreate and they told me up and down not to however the trade was "valid" and i generated it the "proper" way, ie i was lieing to them. strike 2 (i went w/ MBtrading, they're excellent and also an ecn. other option is Dukascopy in Switzerland, also and ECN)

back testing in NT, i can only load up a minimal amount of historical data from IB before it shuts me off for 11 min or whatever. Thats a waste of my time. strike 3

Once i got a 3rd party data to use nt properly i was amazed and how ridiculously inaccurate IBs feed was. it' simply doesn't report trades that have printed. it was off as much as 0.04 on stocks. which means it ignored or missed several trades at four different price levels. no wonder you get crap fills on mkt orders. cheap comish is useless if you have to pay extra for a data feed/ or settle for bad fills. strike 4

straw that broke the camels back was ZH's chat post on how they charged someone with a positive cash balance interest against the acc which created a market call and forced liquidation. strike 5

that cards are stacked against you over there in exchange for cheap comish and short availability

w/ TS what appealed to me was a massive amount of ground work already laid platform wise, user base wise, support wise etc. the fact that historical data is provided by them for 20 years is super killer and intra day provided for 6 years is a steal imo. idk of a 3rd party data service that does that for cheap. genetic optimization and neural networks is already developed by several third parties. for futures i have heard great things about amp w/ zenfire, their margin is low and comish rt is .20 less than ts. personally tho, id rather pay a higher comish and have a higher margin requirement to gain an enormous amount of back end data and feature that i dont have to wait for, not to mention a more stable platform that will support 64bit dual core cpus. with whatever their language is, i can still code it to do whatever id need actually, which is good.

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  #8 (permalink)
 
record100's Avatar
 record100 
Toronto, CA
 
Experience: Intermediate
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Hi sefstrat,

could you clarify "For futures trading there is no question that ZenFire leaves IB in the dust in every respect, I wouldn't even consider trading futures through IB." I am on IB and trying to trade YM, what I am missing?

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  #9 (permalink)
 
sefstrat's Avatar
 sefstrat 
Austin, TX
 
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record100 View Post
Hi sefstrat,

could you clarify "For futures trading there is no question that ZenFire leaves IB in the dust in every respect, I wouldn't even consider trading futures through IB." I am on IB and trying to trade YM, what I am missing?

Get a ZenFire demo account from amp or mirus and find out =)

ZenFire is *much* faster than IB's data feed, and you get historical tick data.

I'm not sure about amp but on mirus the commissions are comparable, only a few cents more than IB per contract and their margin is alot lower than IB so you can use more leverage.

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  #10 (permalink)
 aviat72 
San Francisco Bay Area
 
Experience: Intermediate
Platform: NT,TOS,IB
Trading: ES,CL,TF
Posts: 281 since Jun 2010
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I once tried out an Infinity Futures data-feed and actually found the fast updates too much for me to handle. The DOM flashed too fast to be useful.

IB's sampled feed sends between 10-20 updates per second for the more common liquid contracts which is good enough for the manual trader.

The good thing about the filtered feed is that it almost always up to date with the market regardless of the tick volume. A tick true feed dies or overloads the system when high vol periods hit.

And I have very good experience with executions on futures with IB; people typically never complain about that.

However their data is not continuous so you may miss out on highs and lows. You might see your stop orders fill at a higher price than what is shown on the chart because the tick data is filtered. However their 5 second bars are not filtered and have the correct volume.

And execution quality is so much better than TOS, Ameritrade, ETrade, especially on options.

tortexal: IB's filtered feed will not contribute to poor fills. From what IB claims and my own experience suggests that fills are as good or better than others.

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Last Updated on December 6, 2012


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