"... is available for all US stocks, OCC stock and index options, and US single stock futures positions. At this time, it is not available for US commodities futures and futures options, US bonds, or Forex positions, but US regulatory bodies may consider inclusion of these products at a future date." I was not precise: for single Stock futures yes.... http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/marginRequirements/margin.php?ib_entity=llc under FolderMargin
Thanks.. to me that just means that your commodity futures positions do not get factored into the portfolio margin calculation, but it doesnt mean you cant trade futures in the same account that has been assigned Portfolio Margin status. Can anyone with a PM account confirm?
The problem is that PM requires a min balance of 100k to trade futures. You should be able to do everything as usual if you've got >100k, or just change back to reg T...
Actually the problem is I must have originally requested the account be a portfolio margin account even though I didn't know what that meant and didn't even have the requirements for it. I funded that account with 40K so it was a reg T account from the get go. Apparently when I grew my account to over 100K it magically switched to a portfolio margin account without any confirmation?!?! I pulled out 45K this week bringing my account to 93K which hit my account at around 11:30pst. After that I was stuck... unable to make any new trades. Probably cost me a few K as I had to sit and watch some easy moves. I am now going to use IB as my backup account I opened an AMP futures account today. I needed two accounts with different brokers anyways as I have three with IB. Always have redundancy. I now have UPS power supply, DSL and Cable Blast, two pc's and I will have two brokers. Only thing I can't control is an outage at the exchange... Damn I shouldn't have said that... look for an exchange outage next week!!!!