Your IBKR connection should survive Monday morning.
BrokerSRE delivers Interactive Brokers API reliability as an engineered service: the IBKR session behind your automated trading becomes observable, recoverable and auditable — deployed in your own Azure tenant, on your own IBKR account, with your IB Key in your hands.
Design targets
Six failure modes that never show up in a backtest.
Interactive Brokers API reliability is not a hardware problem. The TWS API is a socket into a Java application that must stay logged in, restart daily and re-authenticate weekly. Everything below is documented behaviour, not bad luck — and none of it is fixed by a bigger VPS.
Daily restart, weekly IB Key, one session per username
Miss the IB Key prompt by three minutes and the login needs a human. Log into IBKR Mobile with the API username and the gateway session dies. Sunday needs a full shutdown.
Source: IBKR re-authentication docs“Connected” while prices stopped updating
After a reconnect the gateway reports healthy, the last price stays on screen and nothing errors. Algorithms have traded a whole afternoon on an 11 AM price.
Source: production lessons, ConcretumA modify during a blip becomes a second live order
Modified during degraded connectivity, one client order came back as two broker orders with different permIds. Cancel the one you track; the other one fills.
Source: Nautilus Trader issue #4564Throttled when it matters most
Fifty messages per second at 100 data lines, ten requests per second on the Web API, historical requests that return nothing without an error, and futures data conflated into quarter-second snapshots.
Source: IBKR pacing limitationsNo choice of position, timing — or person to call
Auto-liquidation runs without notice. Relationship managers and margin specialists are reserved for “large, active” funds; everyone else gets a web ticket.
Source: IBKR hedge fund servicesBreaks discovered at NAV time
Flex statements that answer “generation in progress”, allocation deadlines before end of day, and a strategy host whose idea of its positions is the only record you have.
Source: IBKR Flex Web Service error codesInteractive Brokers API reliability is engineering, not hosting. Your account, your cloud, your keys.
A VPS keeps a box switched on. BrokerSRE makes the broker session itself observable, recoverable and auditable — and it does so without ever touching your credentials or your orders.
What we do
Engineer, deploy and run the reliability layer around your IB Gateway and strategy host.
- Score your current IBKR stack against 174 production rules before anything is built
- Deploy an IBC-controlled gateway with automatic daily restart and an un-missable weekly re-authentication ladder
- Detect disconnects, dead data, clock drift, pending 2FA, competing sessions, pacing rejects and margin erosion within seconds
- Reconcile broker truth against your order intent on every reconnect and every close
- Hand you a monthly report and an operational due-diligence pack allocators can read
- Leave all code in your repositories and all infrastructure in your subscription
What we never do
Lines we do not cross — because your broker agreement, your regulator and your investors would not want us to.
- Hold your IBKR username, password, IB Key device or Flex token
- Bypass, automate or weaken two-factor authentication
- Place, modify or cancel orders on your behalf (an optional kill-switch cancels open orders only, and only if you enable it in writing)
- Run your gateway on shared infrastructure under our logins
- Promise broker uptime, fill quality or trading results
- Lock you in — the Azure Lighthouse delegation is yours to revoke in two clicks
One resource group in your Azure tenant. Nothing in ours.
Azure Lighthouse lets us operate the deployment from our tenant while your Key Vault stays out of reach: the delegation is control-plane only and cannot carry Owner or data-plane roles. The VM reads the IBKR credentials with its own managed identity. We cannot.
- Gateway container — IB Gateway controlled by IBC, pinned by digest, auto-restart outside IBKR reset windows, automatic 2FA re-prompt until acknowledged
- Reliability agent — 15-second health, API round-trip, clock drift, canary market-data staleness, pending-2FA and competing-session detection, pacing and reject counters, Excess Liquidity and Cushion
- Reconcile-on-reconnect — open orders, executions, positions and cash versus your recorded intent; duplicate permIds surfaced, never overwritten
- Alert ladder — voice call, SMS, Teams and e-mail to your IB Key holders; escalation at 10 and 30 minutes
- Evidence — immutable event store and Flex archive; dashboards; monthly report; drill logs
- Optional warm standby — second IBKR username on a second VM in the paired region, with a quarterly failover drill
Region pairing to IBKR points of presence
Start with a scored audit. Buy the rest only if the score says so.
Every tier is fixed-price with a binary acceptance criterion. Deploy and Run are sold only after an Audit — the same four-gate discipline we apply to our own trading systems. Prices are indicative, in USD, and invoiced by RocketEdge.com Pte. Ltd. or RocketEdge.com LLC depending on your jurisdiction.
BrokerSRE Audit
From USD 7,500 · fixed · 5 business days
Read-only review of your live IBKR stack against 12 laws and 174 rules: gateway settings, IBC configuration, reconnect handling, order-reference scheme, data staleness, calendars, access control, cloud posture. Includes the connectivity-tier decision: Gateway, Web API OAuth or FIX.
A scored report (0–100), a gap register ranked by blast radius and a fixed quote for Deploy — or a written recommendation to stop.
BrokerSRE Deploy
From USD 18,000 · fixed · 3–4 weeks
The reference architecture in your Azure subscription from infrastructure-as-code: gateway container, reliability agent, dashboards, alert ladder, Key Vault, backups, runbooks and your first operational due-diligence pack. Warm standby on a second username available.
Ten consecutive trading days with every indicator green or every red correctly alarmed, plus one successful re-authentication drill and one failover drill.
BrokerSRE Run
From USD 3,200 / month · 30 days’ notice
Machines watch 24×7; a senior engineer responds during Singapore business hours with a four-business-hour target on trading-impacting incidents. Version pinning and tested upgrades, pacing-budget review, monthly reconciliation review, quarterly drills, written monthly report.
Monthly report by the fifth business day with SLO attainment, error budget, incidents, changes and drills.
BrokerSRE Integrity
From USD 16,000 + USD 750 / month licence
Execution-integrity library for your strategy host (ib_async, Nautilus or .NET): idempotent order references, order-state machine with duplicate-permId detection, staleness guard, cross-strategy netting, exchange calendars with early closes and MOC cut-offs, kill-switch client.
Chaos suite passes — disconnect, restart, clock skew, competing session — with zero orphaned or duplicated orders.
BrokerSRE Reconcile
USD 12,000 + USD 1,200 / month
Daily Flex Web Service pipeline with retry logic and an immutable statement archive; positions, cash and P&L reconciled against the agent’s execution log; administrator-ready extracts; margin early-warning on Excess Liquidity, Cushion and look-ahead values.
Twenty consecutive trading days with zero unexplained breaks.
BrokerSRE Connect
From USD 9,000 · fixed
Move to the connectivity tier your volume justifies: first-party OAuth Web API for headless order management, or FIX once commissions clear IBKR’s monthly minimums — with the gateway kept as a reconciled fallback.
Orders flow on the new path for ten trading days with reconciliation clean.
From first call to a monitored gateway in about a month.
You keep every credential. Your Security Officer creates the API username and the read-only reporting access; we never ask you to type a password where we can see it.
Review call
Account structure, usernames, strategy host, commissions, incidents, allocator timeline. Thirty minutes, no slides.
Day 0Audit
Read-only evidence collection, scored report, gap register, connectivity decision, fixed Deploy quote.
Week 1Deploy
Infrastructure-as-code into your tenant, gateway and agent live on paper then live, drills executed, runbooks and ODD pack handed over.
Weeks 2–5Run
Automated monitoring, business-hours response, pinned upgrades, monthly report, quarterly drills — or take the handover and run it yourself.
OngoingA VPS keeps a box on. An MSP runs your e-mail. BrokerSRE runs your broker session.
Honest comparison — including where the alternatives win.
| Capability | RocketEdge BrokerSRE | Trading VPS | Hedge-fund IT MSP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily restart and weekly re-authentication choreography with escalation | ✓ Automatic re-prompt, voice/SMS/Teams ladder, drills | ✗ “IBKR’s restart and re-authentication rules still apply” | ✗ Out of scope |
| Dead-data, clock-drift and ghost-order detection | ✓ Second-level probes, duplicate-permId guard | ✗ | ✗ |
| Reconciliation of broker truth versus your order intent | ✓ Every reconnect and every close | ✗ | ✗ |
| Credentials remain with you, structurally | ✓ Your tenant, your Key Vault, control-plane-only delegation | — Your box, but the vendor has hypervisor access | — Typically holds domain admin |
| Operational due-diligence pack and monthly SLO report | ✓ Included in Deploy and Run | ✗ | — IT-general controls only |
| Latency to IBKR colo | — Azure region paired to IBKR PoP; colo tier via partner | ✓ Chicago / New Jersey, “0–2 ms” | — |
| Indicative cost | From USD 3,200 / month after a fixed-price Deploy | USD 17–400 / month | USD 275–400 per user / month |
Choose the VPS if you need a cheap always-on box and accept that re-authentication, reconciliation and incident response remain your job. Choose the MSP for endpoints, e-mail and compliance archiving. Choose BrokerSRE when the broker session is the single point of failure in a live book and an allocator will ask how you manage it.
Answers to the questions allocators actually ask.
Due-diligence questionnaires probe how you track open positions, manage trade data and recover from a failure. BrokerSRE produces that evidence as a by-product of running.
Questions founders and COOs ask first.
What does Interactive Brokers API reliability actually require?
Three things the broker does not provide for you: session choreography (the daily restart and the weekly IB Key re-authentication handled on a schedule, with a human escalation path), state integrity (broker truth reconciled against your order intent on every reconnect and every close, so a stale price or a ghost order is caught in seconds), and evidence (an immutable record you can show an allocator). A bigger server addresses none of them.
Does RocketEdge get access to our IBKR account?
No. Your Security Officer creates a dedicated API username for the gateway and, if you want us to see statements, a read-only reporting user or a Flex token — both created and revocable by you inside IBKR’s own user-access facility. Credentials live in your Key Vault and are read by the VM’s managed identity. Our Azure Lighthouse delegation is control-plane only and cannot reach Key Vault secrets.
Does BrokerSRE remove the weekly IB Key re-authentication?
No service can: IBKR requires two-factor authentication for every user and does not allow opting out. BrokerSRE makes the prompt impossible to miss (voice call, SMS, Teams, e-mail), re-prompts automatically every three minutes until acknowledged, escalates to a second holder, and records the event. Clients above IBKR’s FIX minimums can move to a permanently connected path with the Connect tier.
Gateway, Web API OAuth or FIX — which should we be on?
Below roughly USD 1,500 of monthly commissions, IB Gateway is the economic choice and BrokerSRE makes it reliable. Above that, FIX removes the weekly re-login but needs its own session approval and minimums; first-party OAuth on the Web API gives headless order management at ten requests per second. The Audit makes this decision explicitly, with numbers from your own account.
Which strategy hosts do you support?
Anything that speaks the TWS API: Python with ib_async, Nautilus Trader, C#/.NET, Java, and QuantConnect local deployments. The Integrity library ships for Python first, with a .NET port on request.
Is this Azure only?
Azure is the reference implementation because Lighthouse gives the cleanest separation between operating and owning. An AWS variant is available on request for Deploy; the agent, runbooks and reports are cloud-agnostic.
What happens to a trading-impacting incident at 03:00 Singapore time?
The machines do not sleep: alerts reach your IB Key holders immediately, and the optional kill-switch cancels open orders on conditions you define in writing. The human response window in the Run tier is Singapore business hours with a four-business-hour target; US-session human coverage is available as a scoped add-on.
Who owns the code and the infrastructure?
You do, from day one. Infrastructure-as-code, agent configuration and runbooks live in your GitHub organisation; the deployment lives in your subscription. If we part ways, you revoke the delegation and keep everything running.
Is BrokerSRE a trading, advisory or custody service?
No. BrokerSRE is a technology service. It observes, reconciles, alerts and — only if you enable it — cancels open orders. It never originates orders, never holds assets or credentials, and never gives investment advice.
Engineered by the person who carries the pager.
Jiri Pik, founder of RocketEdge, has spent two decades building low-latency, distributed systems for trading, risk and market data at Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and UBS, and runs live IBKR-connected production systems for institutional clients today. BrokerSRE codifies that operating experience into 12 laws and 174 rules — the same checklist RocketEdge applies to its own MultiEdge platform.
He is the author of Hands-On AI Trading with Python, QuantConnect and AWS (Wiley) and co-chairs the Tech Transformation Resource Group at the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce.
Engagement facts
Find out what breaks before the market does.
Thirty minutes on your account structure, strategy host and incident history. You leave with a view on whether an Audit is worth it — and, if not, what to fix yourself first.
Interactive Brokers, IBKR, Trader Workstation, TWS and IB Gateway are trademarks of Interactive Brokers LLC. RocketEdge is an independent engineering firm and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Interactive Brokers. BrokerSRE™ is a technology service of RocketEdge.com Pte. Ltd.; it does not provide investment, brokerage or custody services and does not guarantee trading outcomes. Prices are indicative and exclusive of taxes and client-side cloud consumption.