I have been trying to contact Interactive Brokers but they don't offer any support until 16:00 EST, so I have thought that maybe someone here could help me. I'd really appreciate it, as I'm very worried. Last Friday I had some in the put options that expired that day. To close those positions, I bought an equivalent amount of shares and then manually exercised my puts. That way, I closed my October put options position. I no longer had shares nor October options. After that, I reinvested the new available money in some November puts. Yesterday I received the following email notification from Interactive Brokers: "Margin Violation Warning(Excess Liquidity) for acct ALERT: URGENT: the financial capacity of this account is deficient compared to the margin requirement. Liquidation of positions may commence without further notice." I didn't know what was going on, so I logged in the TWS. And there I saw (and still see) that I still have the shares that I bought on Friday (to close my puts), and also my October puts! It's completely absurd, I manually exercised my puts, and therefore closed both the puts and shares positions. And, even if I hadn't manually exercised them, as all of them finished in the money, they should be automatically exercised, closing also that way my shares and October options positions. As I still in theory have those October puts and the equivalent amount of shares that I bought on Friday to close my puts, I'm being asked for an enormous margin. And, as I reinvested the money in new puts, now I don't have enough "excess liquidity" (it's negative). Everything was OK when the market closed on Friday, but yesterday suddenly I was again with the shares and options that I had already closed, therefore needing to have more money in my account. Could somebody tell me if this is normal and will just be solved, or if I did something wrong? I'm very scared from that email, and I also received this one yesterday: "Margin Violation Warning(Look Ahead Excess Liquidity) for acct ALERT: URGENT: in less than 10 minutes there will be a change in margin requirements for one or more positions in your portfolio, and, based on current projections, your account will be in margin deficiency. The change may be due to the end of a reduced intraday margin period, or other regular schedule. To avoid possible forced liquidation of positions, please examine your portfolio and reduce your margin exposure. You can see the `lookahead' margin in the TWS Account Window."
It was solved automatically on Sunday. The same has happened to me in every options expiration from that one.
It's just because so many here use IB and hold it to a very high standard. Overall, others are worse, but more opaque and do not offer so much so people do not expect as much.
---I have been trying to contact Interactive Brokers but they don't offer any support until 16:00 EST,--- they are open 24/7. just call international desk. if it's a middle of the night in US-it's a day time in Europe. call European trading desk. they will help with whatever questions you have
My PC just failed today. I'm really glad of 2 things. 1) I have an iPhone and iPad. 2) I moved my account to IB, there are IB Apps that run on both devices so that I can at least watch the market and manage my account, with basic but functional charting. Not ideal but it beats being blind and calling the trade desk from Thailand.
I read somewhere that their futures feed is not good, it is not real time or something, I do not remember, or not tick to tick. And they do not support intercommodity spreads (NOB, FYT). Does anybody trade futures with them is it good? I like their low options fees though, no alternative to them for a small guy.
Which would you rather have? (1) Feeds that attempt to send you every tick but inevitably fall behind when volume peaks, especially on anything but the fastest connection (2) A robust feed that scales to the speed of your connection and gives quotes that are always up to date, but are based on sampling 30 times a second (and aggregates some ticks). That is the real choice. Choice 2 is the only sound architectural approach in my opinion. The brokers/feeds that have chosen (1) are always having to try to redesign their systems over and over to avoid backing up quote delivery (stale quotes) yet again under high volume.
WHat about (3) - a feed that has no problems delivering me EVERY tick. Of the CME group. Every instrument. In less than 2mbit average, 10mbit peak bandwidth, which is rarely than ever reached. For ALL symbols - around 250.000. Get it? They send ticks as text - sure they fall behind.