Interactive brokers recurrent data / login issues?

[stef]

Hello,
Have you been encountering data refresh or login issues with IB lately?

I am using the client portal to trade and my experience over the past weeks has been terrible. The whole interface freezes or becomes almost unusable after US market opening hours. It displays a message asking me to log in in order to receive market data (funny that it comes right after a clean two-factor auth), clicking the button then initiates a web request that never seem to complete. Sometimes, it can’t even list my stocks, my watchlists get corrupted or are displayed twice.

Am I just being unlucky or is their service just horrible or running on a vastly undersized infrastructure?

I am happy that most of my trades don’t require too much micromanagement.

[rolandinho]

In the past weeks, I’ve been on IB 1-2 times weekly (say once on mobile, once on computer with portal per week).
All has been fine / no issues.

[mabi]

Glad you mentioned this issue because I am experiencing exactly the same issue from time to time and I always thought it must be my setup. I have an account with them since February last year and I get this issue randomly whereby it seems to be worse when a there are supposedly more people active especially during US market trading times as you mention.

No clue though how to avoid this and I never contacted support about that.

[LeStache]

I’ve had this issue this week the portal was very slow in general. Once had to click the ”log in to trade” button after maybe 2 minutes of inactivity. Once I was logged out completely due to ”a session on another device”. The order ticket was also laggy and produced an unknown error a couple of times, especially when I was trying to get a snapshot price.

The mobile app worked better every time and it actually has more features.

The ”unknown error” sounds a lot like the one @Rac was having. Maybe it’s the start of the year heat but I get the feeling that IB’s web portal is not built to scale that well.

[stef]

Ok thanks guys,
I also noticed that the mobile app is much more responsive and often still in a usable state when client portal is not. Also true that it has more features (support for fractional shares and spread limit orders).
Long story short, if you must send an order but can’t log in, use the mobile app. Now my portfolio has more than 40 positions, doesn’t render great on a smartphone.

That being said, not offering a decent web app for a trading platform in 2021 sounds a bit ridiculous. I contacted support once and they told me to use their horrible java swing app. A fat client application doesn’t make any sense imho, unless you are dealing with low-level stuff or direct hardware I/O, not to mention that it is frankly ugly and cumbersome.

Low fees are all you need to be a top player, surprising but true.

[clon]

…occasionally, I had the same issues the last few weeks. In all cases TWS did the trick…

[Gesk]

No issues for me this week, but I mostly connected through the app.