Technical aspects. What broker has London server with decent platform

[maxima]

I have compared IB and OEC today.

IB has awful platform. It ate 65% of my CPUs with order book and one chart opened.
OEC has beautiful platform and it ate 15% with DOM and 2 charts opened. No doubt it is a winner.

However...

when I pinged their servers... IB took 110ms for 1Kb packet and OEC 116ms. Both of them host their services in US (OEC route leads to Chicago and IB to Boston). The simple waste to transfer from London to NY is about 80ms (which is roughly 75% of time).

Question - is there broker with low commission and advanced trading platform who has their services (LIFFE) hosted/mirrored from London ?

Thank you

P.S. no wonder why people pay for 'local' seats....

P.P.S. it is also obvious that there another 80ms hidden in price feed as prices from LIFFE have to trip to their servers from London, processed and then fed to me back to London (cracking hell!!)

 

[Trader333]

IB has awful platform. It ate 65% of my CPUs with order book and one chart opened.

I have never experienced this issue.

Not all IB servers are in the US and you can set up to use European servers although I cannot remember how it is done.


Paul

 

[maxima]

Thank you. Will call them and ask if it is possible. I really liked OEC!

 

[maxima]

I have never experienced this issue

I have Vista. May be that is the problem for Java. But OEC was flying and ergonomics are amazing.

 

[maxima]

Tried NinjaTrader with Mirus.

Ninja is very good (I cannot assess all the features in 30 min demo but having automated strategies makes it 'gray box'!)

the only problem - Mirus feed its prices from Chicago again! Where is London brokers?? Ahoy!

 

[grantx]

Max,

Vista is well as being slower, and inferior in many other aspects, to XP. Don't know if it's relevant to your concerns but XP may improve overall performance.

Grant.

 

[maxima]

Max,

Vista is well as being slower, and inferior in many other aspects, to XP. Don't know if it's relevant to your concerns but XP may improve overall performance.

Grant.

Well I see clearly that OEC and Mirus platforms are way ahead of IB and they take 1/4 of CPU. Also OEC commission is a bit smaller than IB...

So I think Vista is not the main issue. Plus there are very few real evidence that it is slower than XP. Just another urban myth.

I am mostly now worrying of wasting 80ms to get data from Chicago with no apparent reason (from my point of view)....

 

[dcraig1]

Well I see clearly that OEC and Mirus platforms are way ahead of IB and they take 1/4 of CPU. Also OEC commission is a bit smaller than IB...

So I think Vista is not the main issue. Plus there are very few real evidence that it is slower than XP. Just another urban myth.

I am mostly now worrying of wasting 80ms to get data from Chicago with no apparent reason (from my point of view)....

There is something wrong with your setup. IB TWS uses miniscule amount of CPU on my Linux boxes.

If you fill up quote sheets with large number of very active instruments, there is a surprising amount of CPU utilization rendering table cells. Probably true of any platform.

The charts with TWS are slow and do chew up CPU and are best avoided. If you want charts there are a number of good/cheap third party charting packages that work with the feed.

IB have servers in Switzerland. You can ask them to have your account connect to them by default.

Why do you think that it is worth trying to compete in the low latency game with those who are far better capitalized, are spending seven figure sums or more on their computing/comms insfrastructure and have human resources to run this sort of operation ?

PS lookup the Java "nodraw" command line switch. It may have something to do with your VIsta performance.

 

[maxima]

No I dont think I will be ever able to compete with real scalpers. Its just the way I found successful for myself is to trade within 20 - 60 sec. This apparently being called scalping too. So I gave up to explain that I am not the scalper and just call/scalping as well

 

[maxima]

Latest update on IB.

Ping from my home to their Swiss server is amazing 38ms!! Can arcade beat that?

And yes - the problem with CPU load is contained in IB charts. Without charts it consumes 15%.

:clap:

 

[grantx]

Max,

I can see the importance of faster times but is the difference between, say 100ms and 38ms noticeable on the screen?

Grant.

 

[maxima]

generally speaking it is not exactly 100 vs 38.

Price from LIFFE has to get to Chicago first. Then it gets back to you.

I think that realistically difference in LIFFE price what you can get through US server vs Swiss server is getting up close to 200ms.

Hence all the best priced orders already got snapped by local to LIFFE traders and arcade traders.

So sitting on Swiss server gives you significantly more chances to get your order filled at desired price.

That is my point.

 

[grantx]

Max,

Thanks for the clarification.

Grant.

 

[grantx]

Max,

Could I please have your comments on the following; is it significant?

Note there are two seperate pages, despite identical names.

QuantHouse, Solutions to Trade Ahead

QuantHouse, Solutions to Trade Ahead

Grant.

 

[maxima]

Well it what I would do if I had 10 mils in cash and connections in top of the City.

I am working today - couldnt read through. But diagramm and the idea is precisely what I was thinking few days ago. I hope that connection will cost less than 10K a month. This is very expensive kind of netwrork.

In short words - it is more than just significant! I want quit my job tomorrow and get connected to these guys!! :clap:

It looks to me as a next generation arcade for very best scalpers. Real scalpers I mean. There you can actually compete with institutional sclapers. Also your black/grey box will give you real help (if you have one)...

I just need to find out - how I can benefit from this service.. It looks brilliant!

 

[maxima]

Another update on IB performance. Installed quad CPU today morning and IB now takes 15-17% even with 2 charts and DOM running.

 

[fifty2aces]

Another update on IB performance. Installed quad CPU today morning and IB now takes 15-17% even with 2 charts and DOM running.

Out of interest, what CPU is it (guessing Q6600?), and what CPU did you have before?

 

[maxima]

Out of interest, what CPU is it (guessing Q6600?), and what CPU did you have before?

It is Q9300. was duo 6600. but the best part of this story is that I have passive cooler and even quad core is cool as my fridge! I was afraid that you will have to add fan to cool it down

now I am thinking of adding 2 mirrored disks and installing Vista 64. If Ninja trader will be running ok on it I will probably make it my primary system. :idea:

 

[fifty2aces]

It is Q9300. was duo 6600. but the best part of this story is that I have passive cooler and even quad core is cool as my fridge! I was afraid that you will have to add fan to cool it down

now I am thinking of adding 2 mirrored disks and installing Vista 64. If Ninja trader will be running ok on it I will probably make it my primary system. :idea:

You should probably check whether ninja can run on vista 64 yet - last I heard it only works on 32.

 

[dcraig1]

Another update on IB performance. Installed quad CPU today morning and IB now takes 15-17% even with 2 charts and DOM running.

Java SE 6 Release Notes.

On Windows Vista, the use of DirectDraw for hardware acceleration is currently disabled by default because of incompatibilities with Vista's Desktop Window Manager.

The -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=false property can be used to re-enable the use of the DirectDraw pipeline. However, this is not recommended due to rendering artifacts and performance problems. To also enable the Direct3D pipeline, a combination of the aforementioned flag and -Dsun.java2d.d3d=true should be used.

You might like to experiment with these settings. There are many other jvm options that can affect performance. If the maximum heap size is too small, there will be excessive garbage collection and that will kill performance.

You can monitor the performance of any Java application with the jconsole tool that comes with the Java SE SDK - heap usage, garbage collection etc etc. It is a good point to start if you have issues.

As I said I run TWS on Linux and I have no such issues. Config is 64bit Ubuntu, either 32bit or 64bit JVM (though I tend to stick to 32 bit JVM as the garbage collection is bit more suited to what I do) and a fairly meagre C2D 2.13 Ghz with several screens.

But lose the charts. They are not very good and there are far better options available.