Is anyone else having trouble with orders being rejected due to insufficient margin today? I started the day with slightly over $100K in cash, which should have given me an intraday buying power of over $400K. My bot entered 4 positions totaling $245K which would have left me with about $200K in excess buying power (assuming 4:1) A few minutes later my bot entered a new position totaling $62K which was rejected because my "Equity with Loan Value is insufficient to cover the Initial Margin". I always size my positions to never exceed 2.75:1 leverage, so its basically impossible for me to exceed my intraday buying power. Later, I had another order rejected in a different stock for the same reasons. What is going on here? It almost seems like IB is using overnight margin rather than intraday margin for its computations. Did IB change its intraday margin requirements last night or something? Anyone else having similar issues?
If you have over $100K, you should consider upgrading you account to Portfolio Margin. As long as you stay over $100K, you'll have less margin issues. You don't have to use the excess leverage.
Yeah, I'm actually aware of PM, but have never needed it in the two years I've been trading with IB, as I always size things under 3:1 and my intraday equity swings are rarely more than $5K or so. But certainly, the extra headroom 6.7:1 would provide might come in handy some day...
Just received a reply from IB: Apparently one of the stocks I purchased currently has a 100% initial margin requirement as of today. That's the first time in two years I've seen a Nas100 component get hit with a 100% margin requirement. I wonder if this specific restriction was imposed by the exchange or IB... I'm up 3% on the day, which would be more like 4% if I had gotten that fill. What a pain!
Does the stock have a market value under $250MM? IB does not offer margin on "small" cap stocks anymore.
Its a Nas100 component so I doubt it has such a small market cap. Just checked: $5B It trades above $30 and it does 3M shares/day. And its price behavior hasn't been unusual lately. No earnings announcement either. Very odd... Ahh, it did get a downgrade from Piper this morning. That must be it.