Interactive Brokers

One of the leading electronic brokers.

Gained immense fame with its high quality, affordable prices and supporting trading on may exchanges worldwide.

Pro	Con
Free quotes	Not enough history data

Features and limitations

Features

• Searching for symbols by name or root
• Auto-adding the symbol and required attributes to the database
• Automatic confirmation when querying for data. No need to click "OK" in the "Accept incoming connection" dialog
• Automatic reconnection in case connection is lost

Limitations

All the listed limitations arise on the Interactive Brokers' side so they may not always be overcome:

• Interactive Brokers provides 24 hours of historical data only. See the Importing Data section for info on gap filling
• Interactive Brokers does not provide the day's Open price
• Interactive Brokers does not provide timestamps for quotes. Because of this limitation the program has to assign the system time to every quote. Such a workaround may bias the true timestamp of the quote by the time difference between its sending and receiving; in most cases the delay is fractions of a second
• Interactive Brokers does not support receiving data for over 80 symbols per one account

Setting up

1. Make sure that the latest version of Trade Workstation is installed and functioning properly.
2. Make sure the Trader Workstation allows interacting with other programs via the API:
   1. Run Trader Workstation
   2. In the main menu, select Configure, then click API
   3. Check Enable ActiveX and Socket Clients
3. Make sure the Socket Port in Trader Workstation is the same as in the data source settings:
   1. In the Configure menu, click API
   2. Select Socket Port; the default value is 7496
   3. Run Quote Manager
   4. In the Tools menu, click Data Sources
   5. Select Interactive Brokers and click Settings
   6. Compare the Port with Socket Port
4. Make sure the Server IP address is 127.0.0.1 if the Trader Workstation is running on the same computer.
   To connect to Trader Workstation running on another machine indicate the proper IP.
5. Check Launch Trader Workstation at start, if the program is to be started automatically at boot up.

To create a symbol using Interactive Brokers as the Data Source see Adding from a list supplied by data vendor section.