Clients are not obligated to subscribe to market data through IBKR. If you elect not to subscribe to a paid service, delayed quotes will be provided at no cost, where available. In addition, while the lack of real-time market data will have no impact upon execution quality, IBKR strongly recommends against trading without a source of real-time quotes to avoid erroneous or unexpected trades.
To ensure that clients submitting orders are aware that they are not being presented with real-time quotes, IBKR will provide a warning message at the point of order confirmation informing the client of this fact. If entering orders via the API without a real-time quote feed, a warning will also be triggered.
Additional Information