Pretty cool stuff. Thanks for posting holoiii. Last year, I took some time off to build an IB API client in Java/Scala for options trading.
The biggest challenge I faced personally was dealing with concurrency of maintaining my positions, orders and quote ticks which led to orders as IB API is based on a asynchronous tick model. I ended up re-writing my code with lots of threads/locks to more code with immutability. Curious how you guys architected your IB client?
Also I hosted my client on the cloud on AWS. I subscribed to maybe a few symbols but always wondered in a more production environment whether bandwidth will kill you (subscribed to 100+ symbols and to a real tick-by-tick quote stream not quote snapshots).
Finally I'd love to hear more about folks out there who might be doing more options or futures trading off of IB API. The equity world is definitely very interesting but I found out early on that I enjoy trading delta-neutral and am not good at predicting directions.
Did you guys find that you have to scale up and write your own execution algo's when your size got too big for the market you are trading? Nowadays I use my IB client mostly as a GUI to view my positions and execute complex option spreads; so it's more of a "gray-box" for me. Do you guys trade pure algorithmically or half-and-half?
Is it possible to get IB API access without opening a 10k account? Do they have a demo endpoint you can use? If you didn't already have an existing system built, having 10k tied up while you build one seems undesirable.
The biggest challenge I faced personally was dealing with concurrency of maintaining my positions, orders and quote ticks which led to orders as IB API is based on a asynchronous tick model. I ended up re-writing my code with lots of threads/locks to more code with immutability. Curious how you guys architected your IB client?
Also I hosted my client on the cloud on AWS. I subscribed to maybe a few symbols but always wondered in a more production environment whether bandwidth will kill you (subscribed to 100+ symbols and to a real tick-by-tick quote stream not quote snapshots).
Finally I'd love to hear more about folks out there who might be doing more options or futures trading off of IB API. The equity world is definitely very interesting but I found out early on that I enjoy trading delta-neutral and am not good at predicting directions.
Did you guys find that you have to scale up and write your own execution algo's when your size got too big for the market you are trading? Nowadays I use my IB client mostly as a GUI to view my positions and execute complex option spreads; so it's more of a "gray-box" for me. Do you guys trade pure algorithmically or half-and-half?