Can I do this in IB?

I have an account with IB and I am very happy. Now I want to split my account into two parts. 1- Safe 2- Risky. I want to do this without opening a new account with other broker. My intention is to have some positions in my safe account like 80% of my account and 20% in Risky. I want each account to have its own SMA and if I am out of margin in my risky account, I want to be liquidated and I don't want to use my non risky part of my account to calculate the SMA of my risky account. I only prefer to use my safe account balance to make risky account over 25K so I can daytrade. Foe example:
I want to put 50K in my safe account
and 10K in my risky account and be able to day trade.

 

To my knowledge one has to set up a second account.

 

Thanks for the response. Can one sum the account balances in his accounts (that belongs to one SSN) to be able to daytrade. Like 27K in one account and 8K in another and still be able to daytrade in that 8K account because actually he has 35K altogether? I guess the answer is negative.

 

So you want to create subaccounts. They should offer this, becuase it would be quite usefull. But 99,9% sure this is currently not possible.

 

Yes, a good idea.

 

Exactly. I want to separate my risky and non risky parts of trades apart and I also want to get liquidated in my risky account and I don't want to use my non-risky porttion of my account as a collateral. It is difficult to do this in your mind. You should be very disciplined.
Now that I see some interest, I will forward this idea to an IB rep.

 

Another thing which i find missing in TWS is mentioned in this topic:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=177695

Generic parent-child orders seem to be impossible.

Note that TWS is so flexible that often you can find a work-around for these kind of things.

 

BTW they could solve this in a very simple way.

Just give the customer the option to login with .1 to .10 behind the username (10 subaccounts possible in this example).

When logging in with .N (N from 1 to 10) a new instance of TWS shoud open (i.e. clean when not used before).

When you login without the .N the aggregated subaccounts should show up (like it is now).

 

BTW, you could do this by creating multiple pages. Then you don't trade anymore from the portfolio-page (if you do so now) but from the risk or no-risk page.

 

IB have feature poll on their website, take a ticket and stand in line.

You can create sub accounts but i doubt if they calculate margin across them.