I suspect either a software glitch or your individual situation somehow slipped between their controls in this instance. I've had a number of bizarre one-off looking incidents over the years with IB as well. If - and it can be a BIG if - I can get to the right guy at IB that really knows what's going on, sometimes we can figure out precisely what happened. Stuff that's flat out wrong and horribly egregious and could wreck my account...it happens. I know that cancellation function still works because I trade futures options and I have to leg smaller pieces of spreads at times. One may execute and some other leg just turns red because it will result in margin issues. I know it's slightly different from your situation. I would try to get to someone at IB that will explain how their algo works. This might be impossible, but worth a try. Someone there knows...and figuring out why this one time it failed may be a simple thing and maybe you can avoid it in the future. A few months back I had a few ITM spreads that were expiring and exercising. At 4pm Friday, my account value dropped by 40% in an instant and the options disappeared. They had taken the positions away but failed to provide me with the cash. Obviously I went batshit. It was 3 days later before the money was restored and fortunately I wasn't on tilt with margin at that time - harrowing anyway. I later learned that it was just a random thing that certain contracts "didn't get around to getting exercised internally" and it wound up getting fixed later. Today, I don't let anything expire in the money. It sucks, but I can't risk this happening again.
Wrong order gets through all the time through TWS and once it was identified, IB will reverse the order immediately. I have SPY shorts through several times in an IRA account, and it was immediately covered by TWS. njrookie
no. i will these type of things as small costs of doing business. you are trading off some glitches with financial stability.
Agreed these are small change. However, these issues tell me that someday there could be a big affect on my account because my broker's system doesn't work for whatever reason. Learning for me has been that I definitely want to diversify among at least 2 brokers. I am hoping to get some serious responses here: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3610755#post3610755
if you do not do 10K future contracts, IB is pretty competitive. their way of ruthlessly enforcing margin requirement - sometime not exactly correctly - makes me feel safe about the firm and my money.
Since you got filled on ES on a price move against the direction of that trade, if your NQ position was same direction it also lost value, may-be this is the reason why your order was allowed but then the adverse excursion of the markets did place you out of margin compliance. For my automated strategies, I decided a long time ago to trade each strategy in a separate account, for just that reason.
I am positive it was some bug or somehow my order went through (some memory leak something in TWS I don't know). I have moved forward and I am glad I got this education for just $200 that I want to diversify among multiple brokers and always would like to keep a set of eyes on my current positions and orders. I think it is very cheap education for just 200$ Btw, your proposition is incorrect since I had around $ 900 in excess equity when the long ES order executed. Initial margin required for ES is $ 2187.