Interactive Brokers API integration

Why people come to us for IBKR specifically

Interactive Brokers has one of the most capable APIs in the business, and one that off-the-shelf platforms can't tap into. If your strategy lives in MetaTrader, TradingView or a spreadsheet today, connecting it to IBKR properly means custom software, not a plugin. That's most of what we're asked to build here: a system that runs your logic directly against the IBKR API, unattended, reliably.

Which IBKR API to build on

Interactive Brokers offers more than one way in. For most automated strategies the answer is the TWS API running against IB Gateway. Here is how the options compare.

What we build on the IBKR API

• TWS API and IB Gateway. Systems that run against Trader Workstation or headless via IB Gateway, so your strategy trades without a person watching.
• FIX connectivity where you need lower latency or an institutional setup.
• Multi-account execution. One system across several IB accounts, with per-account risk, what prop desks and small managers usually need.
• Every order type your strategy uses, plus the risk checks that run before an order leaves.

The IBKR-specific engineering

Building well on IBKR means handling the things its API actually does, not a generic idea of “a broker connection”:

• Pacing violations: staying within IBKR's request limits so the connection isn't throttled.
• Reconnecting to TWS or IB Gateway after a restart or nightly reset without losing state or double-sending orders.
• Reconciling positions and open orders against what IBKR reports, continuously.
• Handling partial fills and the API's asynchronous, event-driven order updates correctly.

This is the unglamorous half that decides whether a system survives a live market. It's also why “can AI do this now?” misses the point. The strategy might be simple. Running it correctly against IBKR, with real money, is engineering.

Running unattended, day after day

TWS and IB Gateway restart once a day and ask for a fresh login from time to time, including two-factor authentication. A system that only works between restarts is not finished. Ours reconnect cleanly, rebuild their picture of orders and positions from what IBKR reports, refuse to send an order twice, and alert a person when a login needs one.

Market data, honestly

Live market data through the API needs the matching subscriptions on your IBKR account, and the number of instruments you can stream at once depends on your account. Many strategies need far less data than people expect. We tell you which subscriptions your strategy actually needs before you pay for any, and when a separate feed such as IQFeed makes more sense. More on that on the market-data engineering page.

Paper first, then live

Every system we build on IBKR runs on a paper account before it touches real money. Paper trading is where the edge cases show up: disconnects, partial fills, rejected orders. It is also more forgiving than the live market, because simulated fills are not real fills, so we treat a clean paper run as the minimum bar for going live, not proof that live will match. You decide when to switch.

Several accounts from one system

A prop desk or a small manager often needs one strategy running across several IBKR accounts. Where accounts are independent, the system manages each one with its own position sizing and risk limits. Where an adviser account structure is in place, IBKR's own allocation features can split one order across accounts, and we build around them. Either way, every account is reconciled separately against what IBKR reports.

See one running

A short demo of an in-house build placing a two-leg index-options order on an IBKR paper account. The full write-up is in the 0DTE case study, and a client research-to-paper-trading project is in the pattern-recognition case study.

Examples from our IBKR work

• Keeping several accounts in line with target allocations the client sets: positions and values read for every managed account, a margin check before trading, and commissions and executions recorded after.
• Copying positions from one IBKR account to others through separate TWS sessions, syncing by position so a missed or partly filled order is corrected on the next pass.
• A client’s system first built on IBKR in 2020 and extended over five years to three Indian brokers, with one order flow across all four.
• A full US market tick feed driving orders to IBKR, with the client’s formulas compiled while the program runs so they can change without a new release.

Client names and results are withheld. These describe the engineering only.

In any language IBKR supports

The IBKR API works with Python, C++, C#, Java and more. We pick the language your setup and latency budget call for: Python for most systems, C++ when microseconds matter. Our Python vs C# vs C++ guide explains the trade-off. See the full picture on the technology page, or the parent broker API integration service.

Comparing brokers? Our broker API comparison sets IBKR beside Schwab, Alpaca, Tradier, Tastytrade and others, taken from each broker's own documentation. We also build on Charles Schwab and the other US broker APIs. If you research on QuantConnect first, read QuantConnect vs your own stack.