Introduction
Interactive Brokers (IB) is one of most popular brokers among institutional traders, professional traders and serious retail traders. IB was one of the first few brokers to provide retail traders an option to automate their trading processes using their TWS API. In this short article, we will list the advantages and disadvantages of their TWS API.
Advantages of IB TWS API
- TWS API is completely free to use for all it's clients, though in some countries there could be a very small minimum activity fee criterion.
- TWS API supports multiple languages (python, C#, C++, Java & VB)
- IB API is very old and hence it's very robust and stable compared to it's competitors
- IB provides a free demo account (with all API features) which can be used by traders to explore API functionality before opening an actual account.
Disadvantages of IB API
- TWS API is relatively complex and learning curve can be a bit steep for beginners
- TWS API is asynchronous in nature, as a result programming can be a bit tricky even for simple tasks like requesting historical data.
- TWS doesn't offer REST API, users need to run IB gateway or TWS application on local machine in order to access API. IB offers a relatively new client portal web API that is RESTful, but it doesn't offer all the functionality of the TWS API.
- API documentation is poor and customer support is not that great.
Conclusion
While IB TWS API can be a bit overwhelming for beginning traders because of it's steep learning curve and complexity, we believe that it is still the best choice for professional algorithmic traders mainly because of their robust API and a host features that the API offers to it's client.