Troubleshooting Slow Data Loading when using Interactive Brokers

If you are connecting with Interactive Brokers, the limitations that they put on loading historical Time and Sales data is too restrictive for data-intensive studies such as volume-related studies, Volume Imprint, Cumulative Delta or TPO. They only allow 1000 ticks per request and limit the number of requests. This means any study loading data, especially tick data might take awhile. Interactive Brokers' data servers are quite slow and trying to download tick data from them is incredibly slow. Their data is throttled: https://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/historical_limitations.html

With IBKR, we usually recommend an additional feed for historical tick data, such as IQFeed or dxFeed. Switching to Rithmic or CQG will also make a big difference.