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Anyone Caught in Interactive Brokers Platform Crash on 1.5.18?
Was anyone caught in the IB platform crash/disconnection on Friday, 1.5.18? IB was down for several hours. Not sure, but it may only have affected live trading. I happened to close a small winning trade and took a break, apparently just a few minutes before the event occurred, so I didn't actually see it happen.
Other than setting up a second brokerage account where one could go and place a counter trade from the one you have been severed from in this type of instance, is there any other way to protect yourself? (As I understand it, IB was unable to execute stop orders that were submitted before the event occurred.)
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
it is rather hard to protect yourself if the broker feed itself had technical difficulties and you are unable to execute.
Always have your trade desk number handy.
You can take protective measures if failures occur on your side whether technical or other.
However, in both cases, you can have a second account to execute from and it could be a good alternative.
Matt Z
Optimus Futures
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However if a stop in place it should be in order book.
Problem comes when no stops. Rarely at this time trade desk number helps if broker side problem...due to L waits. However if broker is good they should help reconcile. I have had TS give me credit
My understanding with regard to the IB event is that everything on the IB side (at least for live trading) crashed, so stops already placed by traders did not function. Would be interested if someone would confirm that this was the case. As mentioned, I was 'flat', probably 20 minutes or less before the event.
I hold an options position with IB but it doesn't expire until mid Feb, but it is very disturbing when one of the largest futures brokers has a system crash lasting many hours, especially when there was little to no news about the cause.
I've been with IB for 10+ years and I can't recall an issue that lasted more than a few minutes and those were very rare.
I thought IB had multiple redundant backup systems, that would take over in the event of a system-wide crash. I guess not.
Agree with you completely. I would really appreciate it if IB would post something on their website explaining what happened and what, if anything, they are working on to try to prevent such severe future events.
I would be happy to provide IB a signed instruction (standing, contingent order) that in the event of such an occurrence they immediately flatten my position through some hardened back channel (which they may need to develop.) Might not be fail-safe, but the effort would be appreciated. Reaching their help desk in the event of this kind of event would be an extremely slow process. With the above suggestion, no call would be needed.
Stops live on the exchange, so they would still function if already submitted. I agree with other posters as far as preparedess, have their phone number handy. Even if platforms do go down, there are still people who submit orders the old school way over the phone.
Hello I was caught in it too. As I work in Europe, I imagine that their failure included the US and Europe, since you guys are on the Westcoast.
They were of course completely unavailable on the phone for the duration of the crash. No market data, no access to the trades.
Today (a normal day) their swiss bureau took a full 20mn to answer my call. I asked for explanation, they just answered they suffered a major incident. They did not volunteer any compensation for at least the market feeds I pay for . All in all, a very poor handling of the post-crash: no information on their site, no apology to the clients, no explanation given as to whether this will be fixed in the future.
Regards
Geodoc
I also experienced the outage on Friday. I was lucky to be flat as well (been taking cold meds and cant trust anything my brain tells me). It was frustrating because their status pages said all was well and I couldnt initiate a support chat to see if it was just a problem on my end. Had also checked here to see if there was a thread. Really opened my eyes to a class of risk I had been overlooking, even though I almost always attach a stop to the entry order or right after being filled.
