Let me ask you(rmorse) does your firm allow portfolio margin accounts like ones IB offers such as 6 to 1 margin.
Here was the reply I got in PM from ids. Exactly answered my needs, maybe some others could benefit from the same. This applies only to short positions, where they're treated differently than longs. The list on the Web page has non-marginable securities. Your securities are marginable. If you go long, the margin will be 15% or so. The problem is you are shorting and market capitalization of these funds is below $500 million. We consider such positions as dangerous. The margin goes up linearly from nominal to 100% for market cap moving from $500 to $250 million. We are using multi-days moving averages of market cap but you can recon the margin approximately. Now, below $250 you can get more than 100% margin if it is a cheap stock (less than $2.5). I hope it makes things clearer for you.
Yea, but you have to right click -> Contract Info -> Show Margin Impact for EVERY. SINGLE. POSITION. You can't sort by the margin impact. The Risk -> Margin report is useless. People have been asking for a Margin column since 2004. Yes, more than 12 years ago. And it's doable, because I managed to calculate it via the API and display it updated once a minute in my browser. Why does IB refuse to implement this feature?