Is the Interactive Brokers API suitable for hft?

Question

By hft here I mean anything with holding period less than 5-10mins...

Any empirical/anecdotal evidence of using it successfully on even higher frequencies?

Answer 1

Holding period and trade frequency are two different things. If you have a high trade frequency, the name of the game is negotiating lower commissions. That being said, the TWS API gives you the same quality feed as you get using TWS itself.

From Article on HFT Provided by Dirk Eddelbuettel in this question about HFT:

High-frequency trading (HFT) is a subset of algorithmic trading where a large number of orders (which are usually fairly small in size) are sent into the market at high speed, with round-trip execution times measured in microseconds (Brogaard, 2010). Programs running on high-speed computers analyse massive amounts of market data, using sophisticated algorithms to exploit trading opportunities that may open up for milliseconds or seconds. Participants are constantly taking advantage of very small price imbalances; by doing that at a high rate of recurrence, they are able to generate sizeable profits. Typically, a high frequency trader would not hold a position open for more than a few seconds. Empirical evidence reveals that the average U.S. stock is held for 22 seconds

Updates and orders with the TWS API occur on the order of 10s to 100s of milliseconds, as far as I can tell, which would disqualify it for use in the regime described in the article. (This is just what I have measured on my own computer on my retail Internet connection.)

Honestly I would be surprised if anyone could do HFT with any retail product. Sounds impossible.

Answer 2

For real HFT, IB is absolutely not going to work. The prices in IB update a max of about 7 times a second.

However, for a holding period of 5 to 10 minutes though, which is certainly not high frequency, it works fine.

Answer 3

This has nothing to do with IB in particular. The primary issue with retail data feeds is that they run over the Internet. That means dealing with a shared line and all of the latency spikes that comes with it.

Institutional traders, even when they aren't co-located, build a private network pipe to their data vendor since that's the only way to prevent network jitter (and hacking attempts). Regardless of vendor or even application domain, it is simply impossible to run a real-time mission-critical business over the Internet.

So, no, IB can't be used for HFT. And neither can anything else.

Answer 4

I'll just add that with Interactive Brokers you have to be aware of their cancel fees. Remember, Interactive Brokers owns Timber Hill, a very large and active market maker. They will discourage you from competing with Timber Hill through monetary disincentives, among other things.

For example, if you send a directed order (i.e., you don't allow IB to SMART route it), that order will be subject to a cancellation fee. See: http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=otherFees, specifically the Stock tab.

You'll notice a $0.12 fee for cancelling or modifying directed orders. This is outrageously high and completely eliminates any HF strategy, even if the latency, market data, and other issues raised in the other answers were non-existent.

IB is not interested in HFT flow. They make their money in other ways. Automated traders that choose to use IB are best off letting them route with SMART and accept/embrace the fact that Timber Hill will get a chance to internalize the order.

Answer 5

IMHO, IB is one of the best retail brokers for HFT.

It is indeed perhaps the only one that retail traders can use because: - they provide an easy to use API to trade automatically. - commissions are very competitive. I haven't found a cheaper broker then them - IB is owned by HFT firm; and they seem to know what they are doing!

I have not found any subtitute to them yet!!!!

Answer 6

Data over IB's API is not real time. You can't even match up bid, asks, and lasts with their appropriate sizes. It's actually a 200 ms snapshot. For more reliable data go with B-PIPE, DTN or eSignal (they all have APIs) and a high speed co-located Ethernet or T1 connection to your vendor. Lots of additional coding is required.

Answer 7

with holding period less than 5-10 mins...

For that you need this application (high specialized client for IB):

http://www.datatime.eu/public/gbot/

http://www.datatime.eu/public/gbot/GBotScreenshots.htm

You can have trades under 1 second (executions in few millisec). From any place.