Haircut of Canadian treasury bills used as collateral

I know, I am writing in very simple terms but they don't seem to understand. We clearly speak two different languages so I made it even more simple and wrote:

"If I have on my account USD 10k in T-bills, No settled cash, and 1 ZN contract that requires a margin of USD 3k, do you charge me interests on 3k or not?"

and the IB answer was:

"If you dont have cash, then a loan will be created taking T bill as a collateral which. The loan will be sweeped to commodities and the interest will be charged on the negative settled cash.
Hence the answer is yes, interest will be charged on 3000."

which is clearly wrong. To be honest it is a waste of time to get them to confirm what we already know about T Bills. The question is whether we can do something equivalent with EUR futures but we will never get a competent answer from them. @def is the only chance, he said it is now possible but we are still waiting for the list of eligible EUR tradeable bonds....

 

This thread turned out to be quite important for many IB users.
I know there are many different questions being asked back and forward.
Let's be nice and give @def a big thank you for the help.
Looking forward to the answers on how you can tell what can be used for collateral.

 

Dear @def can we please receive an update on use of high grade EU govies as collateral for futures instead of cash? Thanks

 

Sorry, I'll need to ask for a list and see if I can post it.

 

@def
Where you able to get any update on the list of EU government bonds as collateral for futures instead of cash?

 

To update. I was conflating margin and collateral causing confusion when communicating. Right now, we do not accept bonds outside of US treasuries as collateral for cash. We are considering taking in gov't bonds on exchanges that accept them as collateral, but I don't have a timeline. sorry for all the confusion.

 

Communication with IB and within IB is so complicated...

 

Hi M.W, Thanks for your reply. when you said " If your commodity futures require x amount of capital to support initial and maintenance margin then that is treated in the exact same way than purchasing stock that requires capital to support a purchase based on margin or cash. " does that mean I can also use my spy shares as a collateral for future segment account? I know that the haircut will be much much higher than t bills/bonds. Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks a lot for the info. I am wondering if you can use other securities as future collateral (e.g spy) instead of t bill? Thanks in advance.

 

i got the same reply, which is totally useless