IB Session Expired Problem

[Yowster 9,174]

I recently opened an Interactive Brokers account to take advantage of lower commissions and better price executions for my options trades.  Things worked fine at home but I ran into "session expired" problems when using WebTrader at work (behind a firewall with mandatory proxy server config).   It seems that the firewall/proxy uses multiple IP addresses for outgoing internet traffic (I've got to believe this is a fairly common thing) but the IB web software doesn't like things coming from multiple IP addresses for the same session and terminates the session when it happens - which usually takes only a minute or so.   This problem was surprising to me because the WebTrader description says its ideal for when working behind a firewall.  The IB support person I got on their live chat didn't have a solution.

 

Has anybody else encountered this problem and do you know of a solution to get around it???

 

Thanks.

[PaulCao 51]

Hi, 

 

Can you access Windows Remote Desktop at work?

 

You can leave your home computer on and set the Windows Remote Desktop Service on and you can remote into your home computer and use WebTrader that way, 

 

Best,

PC

[Yowster 9,174]

Hi, 

 

Can you access Windows Remote Desktop at work?

 

You can leave your home computer on and set the Windows Remote Desktop Service on and you can remote into your home computer and use WebTrader that way, 

 

Best,

PC

 

PC,

 

Thanks for the suggestion.  I can RDP from work, however my home PC is Win8 Basic and you need Win8 Pro or Win8 Enterprise to host incoming RDP connections so it looks like I'm out of luck with this option.  A co-worker suggested setting up a small Amazon Cloud server than I could RDP into for the same purpose and I'll start to look into that (pricing seems very cheap a less than a dollar a day for a small server).  I guess I could try the IB mobile apps too, but I hate to do a lot of data entry on those phone keypads as its easy to mistype something.

 

In doing some googling to research this more, it seems that IB considers this behavior a feature to protect against session hi-jacking.  IMO a good thing for at-home users but bad for users sitting behind large corporate firewalls with load balanced proxy servers.

[PaulCao 51]

Hi, 

 

I also use AWS to do trading at work. 

 

Amazon offers a free micro-instance with 450MB RAM where you can run Windows and get a web browser. However, if you want to try to run the full blown IB TWS trading platform or ToS, it's going to be very slow. So you need to upgrade to the medium instance. 

 

Overall, it's pretty reliable. Setting up is not the easiest thing as you need to always access the AWS web console to start your virtual machine and figure out the IP address of your assigned VM; but I find it useful as I do all of my P&L calculations graph on the ToS platform on my VM at home; then later at work, when the market is open, I can log onto my VM and see where I'm in the P&L graph's with all of my trades already set up, 

 

Best,

PC

[Yowster 9,174]

Hi, 

 

I also use AWS to do trading at work. 

 

Amazon offers a free micro-instance with 450MB RAM where you can run Windows and get a web browser. However, if you want to try to run the full blown IB TWS trading platform or ToS, it's going to be very slow. So you need to upgrade to the medium instance. 

 

Overall, it's pretty reliable. Setting up is not the easiest thing as you need to always access the AWS web console to start your virtual machine and figure out the IP address of your assigned VM; but I find it useful as I do all of my P&L calculations graph on the ToS platform on my VM at home; then later at work, when the market is open, I can log onto my VM and see where I'm in the P&L graph's with all of my trades already set up, 

 

Best,

PC

I'm going to give this a try.  Regarding your comment about the IP address - I see that they offer one free "Elastic IP address" that you can assign to an instance.  It sounds like it gets around the public IP and DNS changing after restarts.   Did you ever try this out?

[Mikael 31]

not sure if you ever tried using IB's iphone/android app. it's not very good but you can place/take off trades at least... as long as you have 3G or some kind of data service on your phone it should work.

[Yowster 9,174]

not sure if you ever tried using IB's iphone/android app. it's not very good but you can place/take off trades at least... as long as you have 3G or some kind of data service on your phone it should work.

 

That's my worst-case fallback since I hate to do a lot of data entry stuff on my mobile phone.  I'll go down that road if the Amazon Web Server doesn't pan out (but it looks like other people at my workplace are successfully using it).

[PaulCao 51]

Hi Yowster, 

 

You can try elastic ip on AWS. The problem is that if you turn your instance off after work, it still cost $0.005 for your elastic IP. So if you are going home for 16 hours and then coming back to work for 8, you are accruing $0.08/day or $2.4/month for the privilege of using it. Not a big deal I guess since we pay a great magnitude more for the subscription of this service. 

 

The issue is AWS is really designed for running web-sites or doing heavy scientific computing than our purpose of using it purely as a personal remote machine. If anyone tried other virtual machine services (e.g., Rackspace, Digital Ocean etc.), please feel free to let me know if you have an better alternative. 

 

Best,

PC

[Yowster 9,174]

PC - According to the AWS pricing, you get one free Elastic IP address (the $0.005 you mention is for additional ones).  Since I'm a new user and able to fit in their "micro" image (I'm just using the WebTrader at work) it seems like its going to be basically free for the first year and then about $15 per month after that.  But I'll see if any hidden fees pop-up along the way.   At this point, I'm just happy that I'm able to successfully use it at work behind our firewall and load balanced proxy.  The cost savings on commissions compared to my other broker will more than make up for any AWS fees.  

 

Thanks again for you suggestions on this topic.