I live overseas, and have relatives who also live overseas in other 'shady countries.' What if I wanted to teach one of those relatives how to trade and let them briefly access my account to see how I've set up my screens and such. Or for whatever reason. It would be unfortunate if I inadvertently got myself banned when in fact I was really cultivating a new IB client. (I'm married to an Indonesian babe of Chinese descent, and most of her family did their college work in the US. So the above scenario is quite possible ...)
IB can't be specific ... when Homeland Security call it gets cancelled. They did give some details in a recent thread when someone was whinging that they'd frozen his account. Look it up if you're interested but for 99.9% of us its never going to be an issue. Bluehorseshoe ... if you want to do it then you might just want to open a separate account just for that purpose. Then 1. ib won't fuck u up the axxe; and 2. your relative who you thought was trustworthy will only fxxx u up the axxe so it hurts a little bit. Hell, better still, get them to open the account and they will be the only ones at risk of feeling the pain.
just use some remote pc duplication to show them what you have on your screen. Am no longer up with what is available but no need of remotely logging into your account. And if they really want to learn then they can become a customer themselves like kiwi-trader suggested. They can afterwards set up a demo account and experiment with that. Cannot see any problems / issues with that.
I trade substantially with IB, and as a client I find their obsessive compulsive behaviour around compliance and risk control comforting. I want them to keep that up. That said, I know I will not have access to the facts to make up my own mind whether this account termination is rightful, or an overreaction to a non-standard but legitimate use case. Leaving the specifics of OP's issue aside -- what I found amusing about this thread is a common "cognitive bias" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_phenomenon : == If IB is all knowing, than the client must be a scumbag
LOL. Excellent. But we don't know whether ib initiated it or whether HS or someone stomped them. Remember it wasn't so long ago that some shite was stirring it up by quoting the fine IB got because one of their (clearly) scumbag customers was running a scam and they hadn't spotted it. I want my account kept clear and clean - no one else touches it.
Yeah, I get your point. My concern is that I could have stumbled into this problem inadvertently had I not been reading ET regularly and come across this thread. As an IB customer, I'd like to maximize my awareness of where the lines are, just to avoid dumb mistakes. For the time being, guess I have to make some assumptions ...
i dont know where you got that idea but is totally wrong. from IB " For individual accounts (individual, joint, and IRA accounts), up to 15 persons may be added with a Power of Attorney which will be provided when adding users to an individual account. "
You can add people as beneficiaries to an individual account but only one can trade from it . I am talking about individual account as a single person account. Individual also means non professional or not an institutional account .
thats not true. IB: "One or more users manage a single account." "Individual, Joint, Trust, IRA, Corporate, Partnership, Limited Liability Corporation and Unincorporated legal structures are available." http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/individuals/individualMain.php?ib_entity=llc# There was another problem, maby we will never know what the real problem was???