IB demo

[waytogo]

Hi all

I have been playing with the IB demo this afternoon, and notice that the spread on ES is nearly always 0.5 points. Is this a peculiarity of the demo as I would expect it to be mostly 0.25 points?

Also I am finding that it is not very easy to use in general. If I want to trade anything other than 1 contract at either the bid or offer price do I always have to bring up the ticket and change the details or can I set defaults for the number of contracts or order type?

The depth of market for ES is only showing 1 level (ie the current bid and offer prices) - is that the same on the real system?

Normally I would trade FTSE fut, but I don't seem to be able to do that at all on the demo. Is the real system very different or easier to use (or am I just dim?!!)?

 

[JonnyT]

The demo is totally unrealistic.

Yes you can do all wonderful things with tws or add on's such as www.tradingsimulation.com etc

JonnyT

 

[neil]

Simulation

T-Sim is the waytogo

 

[waytogo]

lol

 

[waytogo]

OK, so I have now downloaded TSIm and had a quick play with it this morning and it is certainly a much more user friendly interface. Much respect to Henry for producing it.

So do people use Tsim for live trading? I see that one of its limitations applies to the FTSE (prices sometimes incorrect). Has anybody used it for live trading the FTSE and had problems?

 

[Henry]

waytogo, I definately wouldn't use it for FTSE Futures in it's current version, stops and targets will be wildly wrong. I will at some point put in the workaround the JonnyT has suggested, but at the moment I don't have the extortionate LIFFE feed on my IB account and I wouldn't add anything to TSim without testing it with my own money on the line first

H.

 

[oatman]

Henry, what's the problem with Ftse Liffe please? I've used it on IB.

 

[waytogo]

Many thanks Henry.

 

[Henry]

Fill prices for FTSE Futures (and presumably all LIFFE products) are randomly reported back by the TWS API divided by 100. Thus if you use TSims auto stops / targets, the stop / limit price may be at a silly amount. It's easy enough to fix, but like I say, I don't want to write and release a fix without testing it firsthand, and because of the way the demo account works it's not possible to test on that.