Has anyone used IB's Friends and family account yet? I posted the following over on IB's msg board: *********************** I'd like to setup a friends/family account , and then link my personal account, and another friends account to it as well. The question I have is, how is margin calculated when orders are placed from the master account? Does the master look at the total buying power of the sub accounts? Are pattern daytrader margin rules applied as well in the total margin calculation? an example: account#1 has 100k equity, account#2 has 500k equity, for a total equity under the master of 600K? Then will PDT rules apply and the master account will be allowed 2.4m in intra-day BP? Also, are OPG order types for NYSE still available to be placed via the API as they are in a standalone account? What about other order types....is any functionality missing? In regards to the "allocation of trades"...is it as simple as I say account #1 receives 25% of all trades, account 2 receives 50% of all trades, and account 3 receives the remaining 25% of trades? If I set it up that way? Just trying to get a better handle on this before I spend all of the time to do a new account, link mine, and add my friends account as well. I looked around in the IB docs, but didn't really see anything that explained the details. Thanks, cas ******************** Just wondering what people's experience has been with this new account type at IB. I'll post what ever i find out about the above questions. Thanks, cas
From reading the api documentation, and talking to an institutional trader who has used the institutional version of the friends and family account this is how I believe it works: When you login into the master account, all that does is give you the right to direct orders to slave accounts. With TWS now, create an order ticket and you can see where you would select the account. Each account would be governed by its own margin requirements, PDT etc. If you want to send the same order to multiple accounts, you need to create the order multiple times, and manually scale them. Think of it this way... it just allows you to trade multiple accounts from the same TWS, instead of having to open multiple instances of TWS.
" When you login into the master account, all that does is give you the right to direct orders to slave accounts. With TWS now, create an order ticket and you can see where you would select the account. Each account would be governed by its own margin requirements, PDT etc. " The above is correct. For margining, PDT etc, all accounts accounts are treated as independent. " If you want to send the same order to multiple accounts, you need to create the order multiple times, and manually scale them. " This is incorrect. You can set-up allocation profiles. For example, if you have 4 accounts, you could set it up so that Accounts 1-3 get 30% and Account 4 gets 10%. When you place the order you will be able to choose the account or the particular allocation profile that you have set up (you can set-up mulitple allocation profiles). In the above example, if you execute a trade for 10 contracts, accounts 1, 2 and 3 will receive 3 contracts each and account 4 will receive 1 contract. This is all done automatically. The account window and the execution window will allow you to view the account details and executions for each sub-account. You are also able to charge fees on the accounts - such as % of profit, or an annual management fee, etc. Feel free to pm me if you want further information, but bear in mind that its a long weekend, and I may not read your message until Tuesday.
I opened a F&FA hoping to make it easier managing eight individual IB accounts that belong to myself and my family. Unfortunately, there was no way to transfer an existing account under the F&FA umbrella, and I did not have time to go through the "new account" /"transfer" sequence, times eight.
is it possible to use IB Friends & family account to trade 5 of your own accounts at the same time? for instance if you had a personal account your wife had a personal account and an ira and you had a regular ira account and a roth ira account. seems like an easy way to make trades in all accounts without flipping back and forth. anyone try this? def do you know?