Auto-trading via IB

It would be helpful to be able to set execution times for buys and sells as two individual groups instead of as one.

Marco, to answer your questions:

-The act of logging in and manually clicking rebalance on my live books takes at least 5-10 minutes. Because I have some non-margin accounts, I also need to change the scheduled times and transaction types for the buy / sell orders. Overall, it takes 10-20 minutes.

-On Folio, it was easy to change the target weights of each folio. I used trade windows, which made it easy. Not being able to specify order types and limits wasn’t an issue for me.

-I’d auto trade my own strategies only.

I think with a few enhancements (like “wait for cash”) and delayed quotes full automation is not far off.

Great feedback. Thank you.

I’d like to weigh in on being able to auto-trade via TRADE and IB. When TRADE first released, I setup and funded an IB account a few years back and have manually tried to enter trades based on Marc’s Cherrypicking the Blue Chips - Standard model. However, I’m a retail investor that contends with travel, work, etc., so unfortunately I do not have time to sync weekly (defeating the purpose). If I could set and forget, I would allocate more cash to IB and subscribe to more models. You have a fabulous platform, allowing average retail investors like me to plug into quant investment strategies. The last fit and finish item is to automate the entire cycle (almost there). If individuals like me could subscribe to a model, allocate cash, and forget it, then I suspect retail investors will subscribe to more models, thus creating a greater market for designers.

What other platform can a retail investor gain access to this depth of expertise, great concept.

I’d be happy to be a beta tester when/if you start work on closing the loop. Keep up the good work.

How far off do you feel we are before we can use TRADE with Canadian stocks?

TRADE for Canadian stocks would be a most welcome improvement.

Marco, is there a “gotcha” preventing support of non-US stocks?
Or is this just some incremental work that needs to be done when resources permit?

It should be easy to add support for CAN, but we want to revamp TRADE entirely, so small incremental work is left waiting.

These some of the big plans:

Automation, which requires lots of fail safe checks (for example splits on the day of the trade)
Real time prices to automate entering, canceling and re-entering limit orders
Redoing the morning account update. It is not very robust now because it’s done via a strange FIX API extension from IB.
Connecting with other brokers

TRADE is one high priority projects. We also believe that automation will make P123 usable for a much wider audience that just wants to follow models.

Thanks for the feedback

Marco, can you also consider a way to add many IB accounts to track a single strategy? For example:

$200K IB Account #1
$100K IB Account #2
$500K IB Account #3

As of now I have to create a strategy for each of these accounts that mimic the amount in each and that’s really time consuming so I gave up because I’m unable to have many accounts following a strategy. I would like if it can just buy the percentage of stocks for each.

Thanks!

I actually do this using excel and the TWS API. I just copy the orders from TRADE to excel, massage them a little and then submit to the other accounts via the API.

If you’re not able to develop using the API, I recall seeing this tool discussed on another forum. I believe it does what you want, using multiple instances of TWS. I’ve not used it personally.

https://trade-commander.com/trade-copier-ib/

Yes, following a strategy in multiple accounts is part of a new “invest” section of P123 . Basically several features to help investors track and manage investments that follow your models or other designer models. It also allows things like manual portfolios, watchlists, asset allocation strategies (think robo-advisors), etc. It’s been under development for a year and coming very soon.

inovestor,

You might know this already but…
If I understand correctly what you want to do (= trade the same strategy in several accounts with different AuM in each account), you can probably create a Master Account on IB, then have each individual account “tagged /associated” to your Master account.
As far as I know, you do not need to be a registered financial adviser for less than 15 accounts. You need to be for >=15.

You then create your P123 strategy to hold the Sum(AuM accross all the attached individual IB accounts). IB lets you define how the “Total” order should be split across all attached individual accounts. Here this would be “by % of AuM” on each account.
If an account is added / renoved, just change the total AuM in your P123 portfolio by the AuM on this account.

Cheers,

Jerome

Marco,

That sounds great! Can we learn anything more about the direction of these exciting new developments?

//dpa

Any updates on these initiatives? Automation and trading Canadian models would be great additions.

Hi. I have been with Portfolio123 for over a decade but have never used the Manage feature for sending rebalance and portfolio correction orders to IB. What are the risks involve with having such a link?

Second question: Does it work trading US stocks in an IB UK account (my IB account is for a UK company)?

Thanks and best regards

Is the first letter of the account ‘U’? If not I don’t think it will work

Hi. Yes the first letter of the account U.

One potential risk: someone logs into your account and bids up penny stocks so they can dump their shares for a gain.

But we do require two factor authentication if you have a linked account.

There are other security measures we have brainstormed like have certain limits that can only be changed if you contact us. For example a minimum price, max amounts/day, etc.