You suck. I pulled out 45K over the past week to pay bills and buy a new car which put my account under 100K. When I tried to trade I got a message saying I need over 100K to trade 3 YM Contracts!!!!!! What a joke. IB will now be my backup broker... I used to give them about 50K per year in commissions. I guess you lose. Some asshole rep who I'm on the phone with has put me on hold for 10 minutes... then transferred me to the wrong department. Goodbye Ib... you will get very little commish from me again. I hope you will be a competent backup broker.
Attached is the message I got. They say I changed my account to a Portfolio Margin account?!?!? I did NO SUCH THING!! I am a day trader... why the fuck would do that?? Now I have to request a status change to a Reg T and can't trade the rest of the day.
reading Protfoilio margin: you cant trade futures with portf.margin account... so when you changend your total account to PM, then you dont have any money to trade futures... So the message would be correct. Problem is, why is your account under PM? And also: "It should be noted that if your account drops below USD 100,000 you will be restricted from doing any margin-increasing trades."
Who would have changed your account to a Portfolio Margin account? LOL. My guess is you did it, you forgot about it. It does increase your available margin, unless of course you drop under $100K. There's generally an explanation, and most of them aren't IB's fault. But hey, don't let the door hit you in the ass. OldTrader