Hi again justisan,
you are mentioning “pending orders” and “fixed orders” – what do you mean by those?
A Pending order it an order which needs to be repeated each new bar. If you don’t repeat it, it will be discarded at the end of the bar it was initiated in.
A “fixed” order (per my own terms) would be one of the kind of Set Stop $Loss (and its variations).
also what I still don’t know is if my orders, especially those for covering the position, are “real” orders at the exchange, or just “synthetic” orders kept at IB’s site until indicated levels to cover the position are touched.
There’s also the PRT part in this, and this is more vague (for me). So PRT itself knows about your margin, but adjusts the actuality of it with an unknown lag. Also, PRT intelligently tries to prevent you running you into a margin call, and if I am right an example of that is the from 1000 long to 1000 short situation which PRT judges in advance of the broker (IB). Don’t pin me down on this.
Would it be correct that the Stop order at the bottom of your picture implies ~3375 loss ? This seems much to me (if my math is correct in the first place) and your problem could be there to begin with.
That something would be added here (for total possible loss) would be wrong (your top-most selling stop order would be making profit (or break-even I think) so it can’t add to losses.
What I am thinking of now is this :
sell at initialstoploss stop // exit A
and then afterwards, depending on conditions which appear on the market/price development / this order has to be adjusted/increased to let’s say to breakeven level:
if onmarket and conditionsmet then
sell at breakevenlevel stop // exit B
endif
If literally done like that, then the condition for the first Stop order is missing (both Sell commands should be in a mutual exclusive If/Esle). So the first will still apply when the second later becomes active (ConditionSet becoming True).
Please notice that I myself am doing these things all over the place, but I take very good care of redundancy and the mutual exclusiveness I just talked about. Never anywhere would emerge the situation that two subsequent order commands are executed. And Yes, IB will deal with this differetly than IG because with IG all sorts of combinations are allowed, while IB just … errors out (well, not “out” really – no wait, it does 😉 ).
Notice that “IB” would merely be PRT which does not anticipate IB very well, as there is way insufficient experience, still (in de AutoTrading department). This is most probably why Nicolas asks you to send this Technical Report (you’d need to send your code to PRT as well).
I have learned to find backdoor solutions to these kind of anomalies, assumed it is an anomaly indeed. In this case it may look like double the amount for the Stop order, which is sent to the broker, but very maybe the lowest Stop order in your screenshot also lowered for price (my mentioned 3375 which seems high for 1 piece (contract)).
But first things first; cause your code to never execute two subsequent orders (also not opposite). Never think that the one will overrule the other. To this regard I see this passing by daily, and it is all over wrong :
If ExitCondition then
Sell at Market
ExitShort at Market
endif
Don’t do that because the situation that both occur or are required can’t exist (hey, with IG it very theoretically can, but never in the given out of context example like I just gave).
In your case (of obviously an also out of context example) :
If OnMarket and Not InWinningMood then
// Set SL nicely low but not too low and do this with Set Stop xLoss (x can e.g. be $).
// But If/Else this again for Long vs Short if you use a Pending Order (Sell/ExitShort m Contracts at $$$ Stop)
endif
// ...
If OnMarket and InWinningMood then
// Set SL to breakeven and again do this with Set Stop xloss
// But If/Else this ... etc.
endif
Hope this helps …
Peter
