Hey, don't blame me. IB's description gives it a different name... take it up with them. And no, with IB you have a choice: loan or conversion. And yes, there is a difference.
It is actually quite simple. Do what ever you want in your IB margin account. Buy/sell stocks, buy/sell your base currency into a foreign currency, buy/sell crosses not involving your base currency, etc. At the end of the day, your account has positive and/or negative cash balances in each currency. If positive for a currency, you are paid interest (subject to the minimum amount for paying interest in that currency). If negative for a currency, you pay interest at the prevailing margin rate for that currency.
you probably put it better into words than I did, but this is what I actually been trying to say all along.
Fair enough. But I never disagreed. My problem is with IB's wording. They present IDEAL as an alternative to creating a margin loan to purchase securities in another currency. So that means that they make a distinction between 1) Margin loans and 2) Conversions. However, I still don't see how the TWS makes that distinction. (i.e. how do you make the choice in the first place). I'm not the one complicating things here, IB is.
This is one thing that puzzles me. I have a USD base currency account. I occasionally do Euro based trades. I have always convert the EUR back to USD after every transaction. However, in my TWS, under my portfolio tab, I have the following showing: EUR IDEALPRO 5000 Did I do the wrong conversion when I convert that EUR back to USD? How do I correct that?
anyone could tell more IB and its platform, I'm very interesting about it. can you tell me the average time to execute an order through that platform? And finally, are you guys using api or oder parallel softwares with that, or just its proprietary platform.
My base is in EUR and my initial deposit was also in EUR. I recently also deposited USD funds. The issue is that although the second USD deposit shows up in the 'Balances' section of my Account window, it does not show up as a seperate USD in the 'Market Value'. (The initial EUR amount does show up separately). I hope IB didn't convert the USD to EUR. How can one tell?
Dude, it really doesn't matter what your FX Portfolio tab shows. That's only for position tracking, and you can edit it to your heart's content by right-clicking on a position and selecting "Adjust position or average price". The only thing that truly does matter is the "Market Value" section. If that section shows that you have 5K Euro, then depending on whether or not it generated a short $ balance, you are subject to a margin requirement or not. Simple as that. If you really do have a long 5K Euro position you should see a negative USD balance in this section. You can also check out their margin reports to see what's generating the margin req in your account and how much.