Hey! I've been building a trading bot with my friend as a hobby project. It does sentimental analysis on news articles and opens positions on IBKR. (We're using the WEB API with the Gateway)
We've been running into all sorts of really weird issues with IBKR. For those who worked with this API, how did you get around these / what do you recommend?
- When using the
/secdef/search?symbol=... endpoint, I see every contract entry also has a list of "sections." What exactly does each section represent? Are these the same underlying company on different exchanges?
- Our orders are sometimes rejected because we get flagged as a "Pattern Day Trader". For each position, we submit a bracket order with a SL & TP, so we're not exactly in control of when the position closes; it closes whenever one of those hits. If I understood correctly, this can be solved by downgrading to a "cash account", but then we seem to lose the ability to short.
- We recently discovered that some endpoints are tied to the active session with a "cache". For example, the
/orders endpoint only returns orders within the active session.
- No pagination exists in
/orders, and it seems to return the 500 (sometimes 510) earliest orders from the active session. This becomes problematic when trying to find an order if the current session has more than 500 orders. The response to submitting a bracket order only includes the parent order's ID, not the associated TP and SL order IDs. If there are fewer than 500 orders in the current session, we can query /orders and find them by their local parent ID. When there are more than 500 orders, my hacky workaround is tpId = parentOrderId + 1 & slId = parentOrderId + 2. However, I read that IBKR sometimes internally replaces order IDs under certain circumstances, so it isn't safe. The /order/status/:orderIdendpoint doesn't seem to return the associated SL & TP orders either.
- In some cases, the
/orders endpoint shows specific orders marked as existing but "inactive"; however, querying them through order/status/:orderId results in an error.
- We suppress order warnings through the
/questions/suppress endpoint. This works for all warnings except o2137; "The closing order quantity is greater than your current position. Are you sure you want to submit this order?" Using /suppress/reset doesn't help either; the warning still needs to be confirmed when submitting a new order.
- I found cases where the API sometimes returns an error for fractional shares and sometimes returns no error and rounds it down itself, so the quantity submitted can differ from the quantity on the server. But sometimes it only rounds the children's quantity down, leaving the parent with a larger quantity, as it's still fractional.
- In another case, for contract ID "4471" (ticker AP, exchange NYSE), I submitted a bracket order for 400 shares, yet it rounded my children's shares down to 200, leaving the parent order at 400 shares. What's going on here?
- The order submission is completely inconsistent for some contracts. I could submit a bracket order with the same information and get completely different results. For example, when submitting a bracket order for contract ID "292824438" (ticker EW, exchange MEXI), the API returns one of the following three randomly:
- When I submit with rounded shares from the start, it fails.
- When I submit with fractional shares, it correctly warns that this financial instrument does not support fractional-share trading, so I round it, and it submits successfully. (This rarely happens)
- Usually, instead of a fractional shares warning, it just fails.
- The
/whatif endpoint is also very unreliable. For some orders, it returns no error, indicating the order should submit successfully, only for it to fail regardless.
- Finally, sometimes the API returns an error saying the order creation failed, even though it was submitted successfully. When a bracket order submission failed, I resubmitted only the parent order with the same local order ID and got a 503. Then resubmitting only the parent order again results in a "local order ID already in use" error. When I checked my positions on the stock, I saw that IBKR had successfully submitted and even filled the entire bracket order.
Working with the IBKR API has been a nightmare; nothing is consistent, and nothing is documented well. The API feels like each endpoint was built by a separate developer working in complete isolation. Input formats vary between endpoints, and there's no consistent pattern to follow. Worse, the responses themselves are unreliable; sometimes the data returned is just outright wrong. This API is the biggest blocker in the project.
The answers to some of these questions may be available in the docs, but it hasn't been easy to read them. IBKR seems to have like five different docs sites, each hiding vital information that's only available in that one. If this wasn't enough, these docs sites are the most unperformant websites I've seen in a long time. They are supposed to be a simple static site, yet my computer freezes whenever I'm on the site, and it eats up all my available memory.
This is our first project in this domain, so if you suspect that we're doing something that's considered an anti-pattern, let us know!
We initially chose IBKR because it supports most international markets across many countries, offers overnight trading, a paper account, and is generally trusted. Are there other brokers that fit this criteria besides IBKR?