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what is better on IB, I believe, that you could place and order, targets and stops at the same time. If connection drops the trade will go safely with original plan, and all orders will be processed according to OCO strategy, which is not the case with ZenFire.
At this point we know about IB's data feed, there is tons of relavant info about this, Zen Fire is a superior feed period. However, is there any side by side study of execution speed and slippage for futures markets on Interactive Brokers vs Mirus vs Velocity? This would be very interesting to see. IB used to have their order routing logic for futures available on the site, not anymore though.
There is an option in the TWS which is called something like "include commission". If you enabled this than the commission will be automatically calculated to your entry price.
That means if you you buy 500 stocks limited to 150.00$ then your opening price will be 150.05 because you have to pay 5$ commissions and these are added to your fill price. You can disable this function. Maybe this is the reason for your "bad fills on limit orders" ? (which sounds strange to me)
For me personally I can say nothing bad about IB. I trade German-, UK- and US-stocks with them for about >7 years and never had an issue. As datafeed for the european stocks I use ESignal, for the US it's TradeStation.
My fills always match with the exchange bid/ask.
Your brokers datafeed has nothing to do with your fill prices because your orders are sended directly to the exchange and become triggered there. And IB is not a market maker. They offer SMART routing which is nothing else then a seach for a better price in their system. You can also disable this if you want.
Please tell us what they say about your issue if you call them.
I can second the bracket-trader endorsement - I've used it for a couple of years and regard it a must for IB. Allows brackets, multiple targets and breakeven.
Regarding poor fills? totally disagree. Plus I would never take testimonials at face value because you never know what that user has for an internet connection and their PC horsepower - which is often the sources of "poor fills".
Regarding IB data - I've noticed something interesting recently. During extremely busy periods (which seem to be less and less ) iqfeed sends me too much data and there is a bottleneck at times with my charts. Never had this issue with filtered IB data - price was always up to date and accurate, no matter how many charts or doms I had open. Now when I anticipate possible peak activity, I switch to the filtered data.
IIRC bracketrader holds your stops on the PC instead of sending an IB native OCO order. No no for me.
ButtonTrader is not expensive and one extra tick per day pays for it.
mRoss21 corrected the misinformation. Buttontrader is good, but it has its own annoyances. And I execute in a basic manner (I'm all about the simple), so many of its features were not used by me.
Reason I mentioned bracket-trader: it is simple, effective, and cheap (was $100 for lifetime though I believe the pricing model changed on Sept 1) which is what most beginning and intermediate traders should be focused on.
I also did not go for Button Trader, as it had too many features. I use NinjaTrader for trade execution, and I really love the ATM strategies with a preset OCOs and a trailing stop. If NinjaTrader was more reliable, it would be a top notch product. We all have learned that it is not. Probably heading for X-Trader.