For Computational Finance Courses

Study Notes:

The IBKR Student Trading Lab offers an extensive toolkit to complement fundamental, technical, and computational college classroom curricula. Through this lesson, we’ll highlight some of the available resources that college finance courses requiring the application of computational finance, quantitative analysis, and data science can use to help meet their learning objectives – including a long list of algos, available through our Trader Workstation, IBKR Mobile, and Client Portal trading platforms, as well as through our APIs. We also have several courses in Traders’ Academy, along with material on our IBKR Quant site, to help complement your learning experience!

Explore IBKR’s Tools & Tutorials

IBKR offers several order types and algos, which may help limit risk, speed execution, provide price improvement, allow privacy, time the market, and simplify the trading process through advanced trading functions.

TWS Algos

While the availability of our algos varies depending on the platform(s) participants decide to use, let’s explore just a handful of TWS Algos to get you started. We also encourage participants in the Student Trading Lab, who are interested in learning more about our algorithms, to take our TWS Algos course, available on Traders’ Academy, which provides a detailed overview of several complex orders.

Adaptive Algo

For example, the course will walk you through algos such as the Adaptive Algo order type, which may be used as either a market or limit order. This algo combines IBKR’s Smart Routing capabilities with user-defined priority settings to achieve a fast fill at the best all-in price. The Adaptive Algo is designed to ensure that both market and aggressive limit orders trade between the bid and ask prices. On average, using this algo leads to better fill prices than using regular market or limit orders, and is most useful to an investor not only when the spread is wide, but may also be helpful when it is only a tick.

Scale

TWS Algos also include ScaleTrader, which, among other features, enables its users to design orders to buy at increasingly lower prices and sell at increasingly higher ones, while simultaneously masking their footprint from the market.

Accumulate / Distribute

Participants can also learn about the Accumulate/Distribute algorithm, which is useful for buying or selling large quantities of stocks, options, futures, or forex orders over time, using smaller random size increments that may help minimize market impact.

Other TWS Algos

Other TWS Algos illustrated in our Traders’ Academy course, include the IBKR Arrival Price algorithmic order type; The IBKR Close Price algo; the IBKR Dark Ice algorithmic order type; Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP) – Best Efforts: a Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP) algo; as well as Time, Size and Price Variant algorithmic order types.

Learn More

Also, recall from our lesson on Education and Tutorials, that IBKR Quant – part of our Campus offerings – is intended for those interested in using data science, programming languages, and other mathematical techniques to conduct quantitative analyses on the financial markets.

IBKR Quant is very popular with computational finance students, as well as those wanting to trade markets using computer power. Articles available at IBKR Quant are contributed by coders and developers in the quant-space and seek to help programmers by offering concise, and actionable, code-based examples.

Now that we’ve covered our platforms, educational material, and useful tools and resources for conducting fundamental and technical analyses, as well as computational finance-related work, we’ll next take you through our options-specific capabilities – and what makes IBKR a specialist in this area.

Come back and join us!