Read or Re-read the Communiqué- June 21, 2002: "Beginning Monday June 24th at 9 am ET, you may either open a new Universal Account from Open an Account, or convert an existing account to a Universal Account from the Account Login menu. Account conversion requests will be processed in batch over the weekend to avoid trading disruptions." Note that account conversion is processed in batch. I don't know if it's available to all customers. Some countries, Canada for example, have specific regulatory considerations. Again somebody posted before me.
yes, you can upgrade and/or start a new account. If you are upgrading, it will not be immediate as mentioned in the communique. If you are just trading one product (cash or equities) don't bother to upgrade for now. However, if you trade both futures and equities, you should upgrade as if you do > $30 in commissions per month US data fees will be waved. Professionals will not get a wavior on the fee but they could drop data altogether. I've traded the beta and things seem fine. Rec'd my account statement, currencies and margin were converted properly etc. One issue that will arise is that you can not currently fund the account with anything outside of the base currency. I.e. if you decide your base currency to be euros, you can not wire in or xfer from an account with USD. This may happen down the line but there was a tradeoff between getting the accounts up and running and doing a significant amount of additional programming. Behind the accounts are much more complex than they seem. I'm sure there will be lots of questions down the line. I'll try to answer them here or better yet, the IB web site will probably have a bunch of threads related to the accounts.
David, from your post it means if I trade for more than 30$ of commission (ie 7 trades on emini/month) I won't pay : - 10$ CME fee - 10$ Nasdaq, NYSE and OPRA fee Is that right ? Another question I am sure everybody will ask : If my account is in USD and I daytrade say the ESTOX50 which is in EURO, at the end of the day will I have on my account : a $ P/L (for say my S&P profit) a ⬠P/L (for my ESTOX50 profit) OR : Will the ⬠P/L be converted automatically at the end of the day using IB FX conversion rates ? (or even after each trade during the day??)
Then the question is on the fees : This is an extract of the IB fees for FX : Trading Currency: Commission: Minimum: Australian Dollars 5.25/45,000 5.25 British Pounds 2.10/17,500 2.10 Canadian Dollars 4.75/40,000 4.75 Euro 3.25/25,000 3.25 Hong Kong Dollars 23.00/195,000 23.00 Swiss Francs 4.75/45,000 4.75 U.S. Dollars 2.95/25,000 2.95 how does it apply to the universal account ? Does it mean that if I daytrade for example one ESTOX50 on EUREX with my USD account : I will pay 3.25⬠for FX conversion *2 (USD to EUR , EUR to USD) + 4 ⬠R/T each time I trade ? or 6.50⬠per day ? or...?
GeorgeSoros: no, you can hold the debt/credit p/l balance as long as you want and convert whenever you want or not at all.
I guess to convert you need to send a mail to help@interactivebrokers.com then ? Would be great to have a conversion tool on the account page to do it automatically with the current IBFX quote for example...
George -- No, Noooo, to convert you just buy the currency which you are in debt with, you do that via TWS (symbols: EUR, USD, GBP...) on IDEAL. Then the currency commissions are applied.
The universal account will put ib in front of the industry, like they were when they came out in 1998(?) with their first retail products.
I think Timber Hill launched IB in 1993 to retail customer indeed... Ok so this is quite a complex operation. Say I make a 1000⬠profit at one time by doing a daytrade on ESTOX50 on my USD account. I will have to buy EUR/USD for 1000 and then I will pay in addition to the market spread (which is quite large for a FX broker) a commission of 3.25⬠??? Or is it that I will have to buy USD/EUR for 1000 and I will pay in addition to the market spread a commission of 2.95$ ? Got confused... And also when I buy my ESTOXX50 on my USD account, is it a loan in EUR ? As such do I have also to pay the commission again ? (2.95$ or 3.25�) Can you give us an example...?