Tried on Interactive Brokers boards with no luck. IB rep wasn't sure never got back to me. In a nutshell anyway to disable margin in Margin accounts? I've tried cash accounts but it won't let me enter numerous limit orders in a cash account.
by disabling margin I assume you don't want to use margin. even though an account is designated as a margin account, if you do not use up all of your cash (ie. have ample cash to cover any purchase or sale) you will not be charged margin interest.
I suspect that what CDN wants to do, is to send in a bunch of limit orders under the market, then have it so only 100% of the account is used if they start to execute from a big event. Then have the rest automatically canceled. IOW don't use any margin. You can do this with an API program, but it depends on your ISP connection being stable and being able to transfer Cancel orders to TWS. And in fast market conditions all kinds of bad things could happen. Also I'm pretty sure if you send in orders via API, then you can only margin 2X anyway - you don't have 4 times day margin. After you reach 200% then all NEW orders are automatically rejected. But it's been a while since I tried it.
API vs. TWS has no effect on your buying power. I don't know what Bitstream means either. If you have a PDT-tagged (margin) account and over $25K equity, you have 4x BP for intra-day trades, and have to meet 50% initial margin just before the close. If you have a non-PDT margin account, you have 2x BP for intra-day or overnight. If you have a cash account, you have 1x BP, and must wait 3 days for sales to settle before re-using the proceeds. I know of no way to limit your BP to any less than the max available with TWS. One of the params for my risk-management feature suggestion is "max position size ($)", which would allow one to accomplish this.
Good idea. My autotrader has lots of built in safe guards, but if all hell breaks loose and my Inet connection drops then I may be f*cked...
Thanks for your reply everyone. More info then I got from posting on the IB forum and now several calls to IB. My goal is to execute no more then 100% of my cash in my margin account. Not worried about interest rates rather I'm very worried about maxing out my margin and then wiping out my account an a large drawdown. I've tried dividing my orders in different baskets that equal to no more then my total cash ba;amce but when one triggers in a group the whole basket is cancelled and that eliminates about 200 stocks with one sale. I remember reading a couple of years ago that they were working on having a disable margin feature.