I value my sleep so have been looking for automation solutions for US trading on Interactive Brokers. capitalise.ai looks like a great solution allowing for strategies like “between 10:00 AM and 3:30 PM US Eastern Time buy 2,000 AUD WORTH AVUV” This allows for ETF purchases while avoiding the first and last 30 minutes of trading while market makers get established. Ideally you could also factor in the buy/ask spread into the strategy as well which is on their roadmap. Is anyone else using any form of automation for US trading?
There are probably other (cheaper?) API solutions but here is one: CHARTIST SMART API Connects to Interactive Brokers TWS. Get it up and running on your laptop and go to bed. Just make sure your laptop doesn't go to sleep too or your net doesn't go down
It sure is! Just mentioned as an alternative. Seems costly to go it alone plus there are some risks as mentioned. You might be able to avoid those risks if you ran it from some online service but that would be an even bigger expense.
If all you are doing is a simple buy / sell, you can use the timer function with Interactive Brokers eg buy at market at 10.31 am etc If you are trading more frequently (ie many times per day) and using the Chartist API, then using a VPS is a must https://www.iozoom.com/windows/ USD 10 per month
I don't know anything about capitalise.ai (but have added it the my list of things to investigate - thanks). I was hoping passiv.com might be the solution. Have you looked into it? I've only just signed up and waiting for my IBKR account to synchronize - apparently it takes up to 48 hours - before trialing/experimenting
Ok, passiv doesn't appear to be the solution yet. The free version connects to your brokerage account/s and will calculate a buy order or orders based on a target asset allocation (potentially across multiple accounts). The first tier of paid (usd99 per year) will actually automate the buy orders with what they call 'One Click'. It doesn't seem to go to the next level of automation to allow you to set rules to schedule/automate the one click. This doesn't really help as I'd generally only want to submit a single buy (lowest weighting in my SAA), and if I cant schedule or automate the buy I might as well just submit the trade myself. I'll keep experimenting.
IBKR: Looks like the "start time" field might do what your after. Unfortunately as far as l can figure it's not available from the web portal ,(which is annoying). I've scheduled a couple of test orders and will see how they go. You can see the orders from portal in a pre-submitted state. I think you could also achieve the same with a conditional order but I haven't investigated that thoroughly. Note: looks like the start time is configured in your local time, so some translation to applicable market timezones required A few tips here: Good After Time (GAT) Orders | Interactive Brokers Australia Pty. Ltd. One way to do this might be to stack up the next few months of orders in a single sitting. All a bit of a pain to be honest.
Yep, the client software is a bit manky but you'll figure it out after some playing around. Took me a couple of hours, but I'm pretty slow.
Can i ask what are buying ? Haha.. I have been accumulating Alibaba but it keeps breaking records in terms of 52 weeks low.
Seems to work well. Fist GAT order went through last night shortly after 2am whilst I was sleeping like a baby. Used unit quantity, mid price buy, no limit. I've stacked up 3 (monthly) GAT orders from TWS now and setup regular cash deposits to my IBKR account. The orders are shown in a "pre-submitted" state in the mobile app. Seems there's a certain amount of flexibility to modify the orders (like #units etc) and maintain the configured GAT without the system cancelling the original order (and I presume loosing the original GAT setting - haven't tested this though). I haven't tried buying a fixed value. I'm ok to buy fixed # of units for now as my account has has margin so will ebb and flow around $0 cash and I can adjust my order quantity as necessary every quarter when I submit my next set of orders.
Just an update on this - I've been using TWS to stack up 3+ months of forward orders and it is very easy once configured. Every few months before the last order set is executed I use TWS to "create->duplicate" a couple of times for each order and edit and increment the month in the start time field in the tabular pending orders table and then click submit across the order table. Takes more time to startup and login to TWS than it is to create the new orders!. About 2mins work every few months. The only other thing to do is to close out the USD to AUD balance (margin account) - Could probably automate that as well - just havn't bothered yet.
Finally got around to trying out TWS with a Good After Time (GAT) order using the recent Avantis dividend payments. Worked perfectly although surprisingly ended up with fractional shares which I didn't think I had enabled.
