GZFX is a stock that trades in 4 decimal places (11/23/05 eod quote): bid 0.0184 ask 0.0185 last 0.0184 TWS mis-scales this by rejecting 4 decimal orders (when 4 decimals is the scale it trades in). I have just begun looking at penny stocks and believe this scaling bug is wide spread or I would ignore it. I reported this privately to IB but received an unsatisfactory response. I want this scaling bug fixed.
I have run into those kinds of problems with the penny stocks with my current data provider. There are not a lot of traders trading those issues so probably it is not a real high priority with the brokers/data providers. I just pulled up a chart with Tradestation and they have it priced in 4 places. What happens if you ignore the 4 place pricing and use the 2 place pricing? That could be to your advantage in getting filled for all I know, the price swings on an issue like that can be large enough to accomodate at times. Is there a way to know just which stocks are priced to how many decimal places? The list is probably changing all the time. I do know it is related to the price of the stock, probalby the exchange as well. I am thinking that I will have to write more code to detect that... just what I need, more code. You might try inserting the issue into TWS with different routing instructions and see if the problem is not with the routing you selected. I can't pull up TWS at this day and hour or I would check it because you got my curiosity juices flowing.
IB has cancelled the order routing to NITE, now only ARCA works on penny stocks. This is another issue in addition to the 4th decimal places problem. How hard can it be to fix the 4th decimal places issue? I understand that getting more order routing places could be hard (I don't see they are putting any effort into it), IB is a joke when comparing to myTrack in this issue JMHO.
Agree. That's why trading bb stocks needs to use special methods, including special T/A techniques. In addition, since most players in this market are jokers, imagine you have the professional insight and experience, including order routing techniques with old school L2 and time and sales reading, you have a far bigger edge than trading big board stocks. Simply because your opponents are not as smart as the big institutions. The set back is that, you can't really scale up your bet size. Investing bb stocks could get you killed, trading them is different. I make 10% on each trade easily, of course, the bet amount would be below $5000 most of the time.
myTrack might be the place to go to trade the pennies. They have an API if you don't do manual entries.
Hmm, cancelled the order routing to NITE? You sure? How are you supposed to get filled by a market maker with only an ARCA route?
Yes, I called IB, the support guy told me that, as I was trying to get my order routed to NITE. It used to be with NITE when I use SMART. So right, now, SMART goes to ARCA, ARCA goes to ARCA. I guess you can lock the market with ARCA to get your order filled, not an issue to me so far, as I only bid and offer stocks. There was a time I need to use Ameritrade to take the offer, so I can get in a trade.