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Date/Time: Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:38:30 +0000



[Locked] - ***Interactive Brokers is Garbage*** (Technical Support is Now Fully Ended!!)

View Count: 11665

[2020-02-04 17:50:08]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
We are really tired of dealing with Interactive Brokers issues and us getting blamed for their damn problems.

Our recommendation is not to use it for futures trading and support for the use of Interactive Brokers is provided within our discretion as has been stated for many years now on the Interactive Brokers page on this website.

If you are trading futures you should switch to the Sierra Chart order routing service:
Sierra Chart / Trading Technologies Futures Order Routing Service

This is a service that has been out now for about a year, and it has evolved to a point, where we are comfortable offering it to the broad user base.

To give an idea about the amount of order flow through that service, last month there were approximately 30,000 contracts originating through that service which resulted in fills (Update: that is considerably higher now). It handled even more contracts from other activity by the users through the TT platform.

And you can continue to use Interactive Brokers for stock and Forex trading. It would only make sense that you are not putting all of your reliance on one broker and use an additional clearing firm for your futures trading.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-07-03 08:08:51
[2020-02-04 18:07:51]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
Now having said the above, there is one outstanding issue that has been reported apparently related to the changes with symbol mapping for stocks:
Changes to Interactive Brokers Position Reporting Symbols and Symbol Matching | Post: 203606

We do still plan to look into this, and implement a solution.

It is just not something that we have gotten to. We will always maintain the best connectivity to Interactive Brokers but we are not ever going to accept problems on the IB side or their complexity, to be blamed on us. Ever!
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
[2020-02-04 20:32:09]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
And yes what we say is absolutely true. Interactive brokers really is that bad. The worst experiences that we have had with users with Sierra Chart always involve Interactive Brokers.

Take order ID handling. Fundamentally flawed. Order modification handling. Completely fundamentally flawed to the point where if the order ID is incorrect, a new order gets submitted instead. Or symbology. Fundamentally flawed. Position handling. Fundamentally flawed. Error reporting. Fundamentally flawed. Market data. Fundamentally flawed. But that does not matter some much anymore because we have our own replacement market data feeds.

We make no apologies whatsoever. Interactive brokers is garbage. Complete garbage. We will have no mercy whatsoever in regards to this.

It really makes no sense at all to be using them at all for futures trading for the major exchanges unless there is some reason regarding your residency where perhaps they would be the best brokerage to open an account at.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-23 01:48:15
[2020-02-09 23:50:23]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
We make no apologies for the Sierra Chart users of Interactive Brokers. Interactive Brokers provides a garbage/very substandard API and we cannot provide a proper reliable interface to them.

So the simple fact is that it is garbage. We are not responsible in any way, never have been, for the problems that you will have , and you will have problems, and you will continue to have problems. We do not want to hear about them.

Enough is enough of the garbage. Please consider moving away from Interactive Brokers .

To reaffirm our position, a significant customer we have in Europe has ended their relationship with Interactive Brokers or is referring no new business.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-10 20:13:43
[2020-02-10 01:42:06]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
One example of a problem someone blamed on us, is that when Sierra Chart is downloading historical data whether it be from TWS, or from the Sierra Chart servers, is that it disconnects from TWS.

This is not at all a Sierra Chart problem. It is TWS which is doing the disconnection. There is no code in Sierra Chart which will disconnect the TWS connection unless there is an invalid server version upon the initial connection or you have set an automatic daily reconnection at a particular time (Global Settings >> Data/Trade Service Settings >> Advanced).

About three years ago, we completely updated the protocol being used with TWS because they started supporting a new protocol, a properly designed protocol from the old completely messed up and unreliable up design they had before, where in the currently used protocol, they provide at the beginning of each message the length of the message. Rather than previously determining the length from the fields which are present and based on message type and server version.

In the past, if there was some problem with "framing", that could lead to a disconnection on the Sierra Chart side. But that no longer exists.

When TWS does a disconnect, in some cases it is because it thinks a field is faulty, when it is not, but they should never be doing that. It just should gracefully handle an invalid field even though there was not a problem to begin with.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-10 01:42:40
[2020-02-10 20:13:25]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
The Interactive Brokers API is so very bad/poorly designed that it is just not even acceptable to be used in a commercial setting like Sierra Chart.

The more we think about it the more insane and ridiculous the whole Interactive Brokers API is and how much time do we waste on answering symbol related questions. This whole thing is a joke. We have always known it is a complete joke.

And thank you that no one is giving us thank yous but we are not looking for any thank yous. We are just putting forth the point blank truth. And people have to accept it because this is basic fact.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-11 03:43:23
[2020-02-11 04:43:27]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
If we do not call out Interactive Brokers for the garbage they are putting out with their API and systems, who is going to do that?

Take the 737 Max story:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-10/-designed-by-clowns-and-supervised-by-monkeys-the-737-max-story

Designed by clowns and supervised by monkeys!

Is this what you want? This is garbage. This is when you have a company managed by people who are only interested in profits, and are interested in just trying to get as many customers as they can, and they are not engineering driven and really working to make things efficient and the best of quality in the operation.

What we have heard is in Boeings long-ago past, was the management was very engineering oriented.

We are engineering driven here in Sierra Chart.

While we do not know the inside workings of Interactive Brokers, it is incredibly obvious and proven, that they do not have technical excellence in their engineering.

Boeing has gone the wrong way. And it is a very sad situation. We raise Boeing here, because when things are not done properly, there are problems and people get hurt.

It is very important we tell the truth about Interactive Brokers because we are not going to take the nonsense from any of you users, both past and present telling us that their problems are something that we have to fix and we have done wrong when we have done nothing wrong. And to think that somehow IB does nothing wrong and it is up to us to fix the crap that they put out. And it is nothing more than absolute crap. It is poorly designed and garbage.

You need to realize there is so much poor design and problems from the Interactive Brokers side, that we are just not going to be investing any further time into any issue people bring up with IB any longer.

We are not the only ones complaining:
https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/incorrect-date-costs-broker-nearly-23m-in-liabilities/

While at Sierra Chart we are not always perfect, we have exceptionally high standards. You will not believe the amount of time we put into the most trivial of things to make sure things are done as reliably and as efficiently as possible. And when there is a problem we will take care of it and when something is not done right we will correct it. We will always improve things and redesign things so that things are done properly. This is why sometimes you see changes in ACSIL.

And this is also why it has been a long time with the release of true millisecond time stamping for trades because we are changing the complete core of the date-time object in Sierra Chart. This takes time.

And because of our high standards is why everyone else frustrates us. And we are working hard to clean up the systems that do not work well for Sierra Chart including expanding our market data offerings to replace some the services that are not the absolute best. But we do not want to go into details with this last part publicly.

And sometimes we know we have some issues, like when there are problems from some of our less senior/advanced developers. But they are not working on anything mission-critical and everything goes under code review and full inspection by the senior engineers.

We have many good things coming, and we do not want to disclose what our plans are. One thing is for certain, we are going to get out from under this nonsense and bring forth a fully unified high-quality platform.

----

Do you know how much money we plan to invest in our order routing service? Do you know that we are going to be spending about over US$16,000 a year in connectivity to ensure that we have full redundancy with the management of OCO and bracket orders. This is because we care to do things properly. This kind of quality is something that is not achievable when we are interfacing with external garbage like Interactive Brokers.

And while we know TT is not the absolute best, it is a good step in the right direction until we expand our direct exchange connectivity.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-25 07:38:31
[2020-02-11 05:20:00]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
Here is one hack in our login process to TWS:

//The delay is required to avoid TWS from randomly disconnecting when requesting the order IDs. Clearly some kind of bug on TWS side. With a slight pause there is no random disconnection.
  n_OSLayer::SleepThreadInMilliseconds(250);

Good example of substandard coding on the TWS side.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
[2020-02-20 22:52:27]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
And we want to make it abundantly clear, it is overwhelmingly inappropriate to be complaining about Interactive Brokers problems or TWS problems and faulting us for those.

Or making a false claim, that other programs do not have problems and the problems are only with us. We are not idiots. We know what we are doing and we understand the origin of issues and understand why there can be differences.

If that is what you are going to do, we are going to request that you discontinue the use of Interactive Brokers with Sierra Chart. And that is already stated on the Interactive Brokers page on this website. And has been for years now.

Once again Interactive Brokers is garbage. They do not know what they are doing in regards to their API at the very least. This is overwhelmingly obvious. It is very substandard, very very poorly designed.


Creating an alternative to Interactive Brokers will be necessary.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-02-23 13:20:11
[2020-05-12 08:15:53]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
Bloomberg article:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/oil-crash-busted-a-broker-s-computers-and-inflicted-huge-losses

Sierra Chart never had any trouble with negative pricing or order submissions. We do not know about CQG, but the Sierra Chart order routing service and the Sierra Chart data feeds, and Sierra Chart itself, all functioned just fine with negative pricing.

It is very telling about their technology that their programmers are not thinking. Why would they have any trouble with negative pricing? Futures spreads are negative. No one should have had any trouble with this.

And then there is the Mickey Mouse way they were handling the low level TWS communication protocol before they changed that only about three years ago.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-05-12 08:18:54
[2020-05-12 11:48:37]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
Technical support for Interactive Brokers is now discontinued and that is consistent with the policy we have said for many years now regarding Interactive Brokers:
Interactive Brokers Trading Service: Introduction


It is within our discretion whether we will or will not provide support.

This is going to be a permanent feature at the top of this Support Board: Interactive Brokers is Garbage!

We are not going to be doing anything further with Interactive Brokers. Development has ceased with Interactive Brokers integration and we have no intention of working with the FIX protocol with them. We did mention this possibility in other threads. This would be a huge mistake with our experience with them. They are not a business that can be trusted or who we can have a proper relationship at all with.

And especially when we are dealing with some vicious customers that we have regarding Interactive Brokers.

Technical integration will continue with Interactive Brokers.

More Interactive Brokers commentary (Mostly detrimental regarding Interactive Brokers):
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/interactivebrokers.com

While Interactive Brokers in the beginning had a good idea of providing access to a lot of markets at a low cost, the whole model as they grow, became unsustainable and they did not have good technology in the beginning.

Why anyone would trust their money with them, we do not know.

This is why we insist always on providing support directly from the engineers here, to provide the best level of support and highest accuracy and to correct issues quickly and to get new features and improvements done immediately as we work through support on the spot.

And that is why it is important to respect our time and to be as self-sufficient as much as possible or post as a User Discussion or Programming Help as a flag to seek help from other users.

One user was not happy with the way we responded to them about an Interactive Brokers issue, where we were just being very clear and firm and pointing out where the responsibility should be with their question, and they commented why we were still in business. It is precisely because we concentrate on the very best quality in the world, and there still is a lot more room for improvement for us, and providing the features people need and we do not waste time, is why we are still in business and growing. Our intelligence level, based on hard work and dedicated study and common sense, is well above that user, and therefore they cannot even understand why we are in business and do very well. Not to mention the fact that they use Sierra Chart. Assuming they continue. But that does not matter to us.

And this is the basic fundamental problem with government. It cannot possibly serve the people well because it is highly centralized, way too big, and has no competition and no longer has any need to answer directly to the people. And it will fight to the death to maintain its position of superiority. And we see this now more than ever, with the virus going around. Governments are taking advantage of the opportunity to exert their influence over the people to the point of obvious irrational levels.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-05-24 06:57:54
[2020-08-04 20:30:34]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
More interactive brokers garbage:
Losing connection to Interactive Brokers TWS.

Simply we are being proven right about them again and again. Why do people put up with this kind of nonsense from Interactive Brokers and come here for solutions, we do not know. This really has reached an extreme level of absurdity.

And we provide the customer a proper solution by using the Sierra Chart Exchange Data Feed but they do not want to use it.

Effective November 1, 2020 all users will be required to use Sierra Chart Service Package 5 with Interactive Brokers and we will no longer be providing Sierra Chart provided historical data directly integrated when using Interactive Brokers.

You will need to use one of the Sierra Chart provided data feeds instead for historical and real-time market data which do work with Interactive Brokers:
Real-Time Exchange Data Feeds Available From Sierra Chart
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2020-08-05 18:48:02
[2022-02-22 11:30:02]
Sierra Chart Engineering - Posts: 104368
More Interactive Brokers problems:
Sierrachart Cancels All Orders on Open Position During Modify While Market Closed

These are the kind of absurd problems you will have with Interactive Brokers.

And furthermore, this only makes it very clear why we put many warnings about Interactive Brokers here:
Interactive Brokers Trading Service: Introduction

And we make it very clear we do not provide technical support when using Interactive Brokers. If you have issues, we will not help.
Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level

Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy:
https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation

For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, *change* to the Teton service:
Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing
Date Time Of Last Edit: 2022-02-23 13:52:01

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