Interactive Brokers’ IBot learns to handle bond queries
IBot can now understand and process most common government and municipal bond queries.
Electronic trading firm Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:IBKR) keeps enhancing the capabilities of its natural language solution IBot. The latest improvements concern the bot’s abilities to handle bond queries.
IBot can now understand and process most common government and municipal bond queries. Traders can ask IBot to buy, chart, view and quote bond contracts, by ISIN, CUSIP for all bonds (US government, foreign government, municipal and corporate) or by contract name for all US government bonds. Traders can also enter requests in normal language, such as “buy 3-month t-bill,” “chart US-T Bill Jan25’18 for 1 week with hourly bars”, “show ten year treasury bond”, “buy 043771ES9 bond” and “show 30y treasury bond.”
IBot has been constantly upgraded. In October, the solution got to help traders complete tasks that require log-in access to Account Management (AM). When a trader ask IBot about funding, reports, market data and other AM-related tasks, IBot recognizes these requests and opens the relevant AM page in the web browser. For example, to fund one’s account a trader could enter: “Fund my account” and IBot will open Account Management in the browser window to the correct page.
Recent improvements to IBot include an ability to learn the phrasing style of a particular trader. This skill is especially useful in uncertain situations, where the robot is not certain what the trader is asking about. If there is more than one interpretation of one’s command, IBot will ask the trader to choose among a number of options. The selection will be remembered, and will be used to improve IBot’s comprehension.
IBot has also become better in offering “Next Step” actions to traders. Traders are set to notice that the “Next Step” actions they are offered after a command is submitted become more and more useful to them. This is because IBot is now keeping track of the most popular “Next Step” actions, and as it learns it will offer these to traders at the top of the list to make their trading experience even more efficient.
To use IBot, traders have to log into TWS and to select “IBot – type to trade” from the New Window drop down in Mosaic. Then they have to enter commands in the text entry field and hit “Enter” to submit.
