Dear Community,

We're happy to share a new connection option for Interactive Brokers users: a direct FIX connection designed to improve the stability and speed of IBKR order routing.

The QuantConnect-Interactive Brokers FIX integration remains permanently connected, eliminating the weekly re-logins required by IB Gateway. This provides long-running algorithms with greater stability, especially those with complex internal states.

Orders are routed through a private, encrypted connection, providing greater reliability and faster order routing. FIX connections are also lightweight, reducing memory usage compared to IB Gateway’s heavier Java application. This lower memory footprint gives your algorithm more room to operate on the same host server.

Traditional FIX-only connections do not provide full algorithm holdings or order state information. To address this, our integration uses a combination of the IBKR Web API and FIX API. This lets us fill the gaps of classic FIX-only connections and fully populate algorithm state, while keeping the QuantConnect FIX experience as easy to use as the IB Gateway workflow clients already know. Most of the existing IB-Gateway order types are supported, including: Market, Limit, Combo Limit, Stop Limit, Stop Market, Market on Close, and Trailing Stop.

There are no additional costs, however the new connectivity does not support data feeds, futures options trading, or financial advisor accounts. Using IBKR FIX requires either QuantConnect data or one of our supported data vendor integrations.

To use the new connection, follow the onboarding process to activate FIX for your account.

We remain committed to serving you the best systematic and quantitative trading platform in the world. Stay tuned as we have a lot of new work coming out over the next few weeks!

Happy Trading!
QuantConnect Team