[ts-gen] Handling commissions and fees

[Ken Feng]

On 9/17/09, R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com> wrote:
> ...
> Then IB went to the the SecureID type token, and I concluded
> that they had good and sufficient reasons to do so to protect
> my account details, and I was not going to weaken protections
> they thought needful
>
> This also forces manual logins, to retrieve web reports ;(
> yuck -- and screen scraping is for windows washers  ;)
>
> ...

Yes, that damn SecureID token is a PITA - I would sign to give it up
if it were not for IB's policity of limiting withdraws without the
token.

It looks like I will go down this path:

1.  Login to TWS/IB/shim once a week with SecureID (done and working)
2.  Upon a fill from shim/upstream, calculate/estimate the commission
fees (next on my TODO)
3.  Do a daily reconciliation of transactions, commissions, and fees
via IB website (not doable with a paper account - will have to begin
development during live trading)

Unfortunately, it looks like 3. will require a SecureID so I cannot
automate fully.  I figure that even if I had a better option for 2., a
reconciliation would force me to do 3. anyways - there will be fees
that don't show up through TWS that need to be reconciled.

I will have to revisit the SecureID issue in the near future.

As for keeping TWS/IB/shim up for an entire week, perhaps IB has fixed
the memory leaks to enough of an extent that it doesn't bother me (or
it could be that I have too much memory on the machine).  In any case,
in the last three weeks or so, I haven't had any problems with TWS
crapping out on me.  I cannot say anything about corrupt data/prices
due to TWS being up for a long time, except that I haven't detected
anything to date.

- Ken