I am from Canada and use IB as my broker because they are cheap.
Trade futures now as a hobby and am fairly successful using price action.
Want to get more into options for time reasons and wondered if anyone new of an options api for IB.
I like IB for its diversity and cost but find it a bit confusing. Thought there may be a company out there that offers options trading using a simpler platform integrated with IB.
I don't like TWS that much myself, but for options I think it's doing a pretty decent job.
Options are more complex than other instruments, using a "simple" trading platform for options may hide some of options specific aspects, so that's maybe not a good idea anyway.
OptionVue (optionvue.com) can use the IB data feed as its data source, but any 3rd party Option platform will have some limitations because IB limits you to 100 symbols at one time. So when you open up a couple option chains, you can easily exceed that number. I believe you can request more symbols from IB (at a higher cost?), but I haven't done it myself.
If you tell us what specifically you want your simple option platform to do (other than interface with IB), we might be able to steer you toward something.
I use IB, but I am not happy with their platform, so I opened an account with TradeStation.
TradeStation has lower commissions, if you trade more contracts. IB has very unclear commissions, so the size of the commission is actually always surprise. You never know. They are hiding behind market fees.
Also their naked options margins are nonsense. They obviously want you to trade spreads, because they can get double commission on spread, then on naked put/call.
TradeStation has better platform, it's much faster.
I tried to open Call spread with Interactive Brokers and TradeStation in the same time. I always manually changed the limit price for one dolar less and waited a bit, and again and again.
First test was OK - both brokers realized the trade for the same price.
But I was very unhappy from the result of the second test: Interactive Brokers realized the trade for price 2 USD worse!
I am not sure if they are playing game with my orders, because that would be very bad, so maybe it's just the "speciality" of their platform and network - it just doesn't work as it should. I don't know.
TradeStation is much faster. I change the limit price and the trade is realized in a second. With Interactive Brokers, I change the limit price and I have to wait 20 seconds to see if the trade will be realized or not. Or even worse: it's not relized, but with other broker it is, for the same price!
So, I will completely switch to another broker, probably TradeStation.
I think that the best platform for options is ThinkOrSwim, but I can't open account with them, because I am not from the US.
Bibr,
IB is way cheaper than tradestation, as a matter of fact they are the cheapest non-professional (in my opinion) broker. Trading 1 lot will usually cost you around 2-3,5$. Only minus is that you have to pay for market data, but (most costly ICE~100USD) even with that it will be way cheaper than tradestation.
Also, you get 2USD worse price because they included commision in your execution price. So you payed 2usd commision.
Bibr,
Tradestation is not considered 1st choice as a brokerage by many. If you prefer the charting, yes.
Re ThinkOrSwim: Are you certain you can`t open an account with them? Normally they would not let you do trades on margin, only cash backed longs. But this would let you use all of their analytical tools.
Why not go first to free dough.com (founded by former TOS founders). They are introducing brokers to TOS (and this grants you a better rate at TOS). Open the TOS account through them.
I live in Australia and have the same problem - TOS, Dough are not available to me. I was told that non US citizens can not open a TD Ameritrade account, with the exception of Canadians and Singaporeans.
My solution to this problem is Option Vue 7. It is a bit messy, but workable.
As an alternative, I am planning to look into Hoadley Options software, a set of modular Excel-based software tools for the analysis of options, which connect to IB TWS.
Basically, set up your TWS or IB Gateway to accept API calls, then you make calls to the IB TWS/Gateway through the EClientSocket class, then your responses are sent to your implementation of the EWrapper interface. Start with something simple, like getting quotes, set up a Contract object for the underlying, strike, and expiration date, then send it to reqMktData() method and the response will come back in the various tick___() methods that you implement in EWRapper. They also send greeks data if you want it.
