I have said this before and will do it now. The TWS from Interactive brokers is HORRIBLE to connect to Ninjatrader. Because of their BAD DATA returns I actually lost > $27.000 last week.
What happens is that when you place an order and get filled it sometimes FORGET at what price you bought it and when you have a robot running, this will screw you up, BIG TIME!!
This does not happen all the time, but when it does, like in the middle of the night, your account will be drained.
SO URGENTLY FIX THIS API issue, as before we never had this with the API. Also the TWS is a huge memory hog and slows down computing a lot!!
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In my experience:
- Never use IBKR data connection in NT, always use other data as primary.
- Restart both IBKR and NT platform every single day, otherwise thereās problems.
- IBKR does not apply FIFO the same way NT does. IBKR seems to retrospecitvely apply FIFO at the end of the day, can be very confusing.
I suspect your āforgetting what price it was bought atā is IBKR re-adjusting the entry price according to FIFO.
Example:
During the session you buy:
1 contract at 1000
then later:
1 contract at 2000
IBKR will show and average price of 1500. Then you sell 1 contract. Hereās where the difference is:
Normally with FIFO, you remaining position would show as 1 contract at 2000. However, IBKR will show 1 contract at 1500.
And then overnight it will apply FIFO and change it to show 1 contract at 2000.
So when the session ends, letās say the session ends at price 2000. You think youāre 500pts in profit, but in actual fact youāre break even on the remaining position.
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Actually, the screenshot was right AFTER I bought the contract. There were no contracts on this account. And yes, restarting it each day would have resolved it. But it is really scary, as I lost this money OVERNIGHT when the ROBOT I programmed was running.
This happened twice last week. Now I am slowly closing all contracts on IB and looking for alternatives. My strategy demands multiple accounts to work really well. I use a multi level kind of strategy. Where I have dormant accounts waiting to get into action.
Oh, I also forgot, I do not use TWS data, I use Kinetick. for data. And yes, I could also tell my robot NOT to trade after 4pm and before 9:30 am with IB, but it feels like I have to give IB training wheels, where it ws working just fine with the old API.
So what frustrates me is that Ninjatrader is not interested into fixing this. (I am already looking into other platforms and see if I can port my strategy/robot to them as I feel this is a bit of a let down of NT)
I really like Ninjatrader, I am using it many years now, and yes I do not like to kill the goose with the golden eggs, but ā¦if other platforms can use their API so why canāt Ninjatrader?
I am not defending NT but I gave up using TWS years ago for the same reasons and others. They are cheap but you get what you pay for. I now use NT broker - every day - and havenāt had a single issue ( other than their weird excess margin messages). Just my 10c.
Oh and weirdly because i trained as a financial advisor IB wanted to charge me Pro rates for data - even though i was retired. How bizarre is that?
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