My condolences to the people with negative account balances. You may have screwed up to an extent in having too large of a position but I still feel badly for you. My rule with the futures is to always assume that I am liable for the full contract value with my positions; I think Black Swan, which means I am trading futures less now and typically use the TQQQ and UPRO ETF's instead, scaling in and out. When I do trade futures, I trade mostly the NQ and ES indexes and periodically write the CME requesting either a micro-mini version of those or a "split" of the value per contract. With Interactive Brokers, I was never very comfortable with their business model, which is, lots of active and leveraged traders of size, in the same boat, with dirt cheap equity margin also. If the market gets too stormy, the boat has a greater chance of going under, compared to a stodgy Broker like Fidelity (no futures though) or TDAmer/TOS. Yes, there are the commissions, product offerings and solid uptime/data and payouts at IB but those are no longer the driving force in my brokerage choice. This currency mini-crash is a small example of my larger fear at IB which yes, "probably" will not happen. So I was never very comfortable having much of my capital over there and combined with a recent reversion of their customer service back to "bad" (which indicates some kind of management problem to me), I am pulling the plug on all accounts there. GL.
Interactive Brokers does not give you 10 minutes to rectify a margin deficiency. Where did you get this idea?
Then you are either lucky, receiving preferential treatment by IB, or have an inaccurate memory. Interactive Brokers does not routinely allow a 10 minute grace period before starting auto-liquidation. To suggest otherwise is to promote a dangerous piece of misinformation.
I hear ya, I think the class action comes in when they say, inspite of all the small print, ib has routinely auto liquidated me before my account ever went negative
It seems others have had issues with ib liquidating when it suits ib: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015...active-auto-liquidation-idUSL1N0VS1PH20150218 Has anyone been contacted by a 'senior compliance manager' threatening legal action (that would surely result in bankruptcy)? Is this limited to certain jurisdictions?
Go and search around ET, everyone who has experienced auto-liq describes given minutes to rectify the situation. There is nothing preferential in my situation and my memory isn't off as I've experienced auto-liq quite routinely.
Why does the SNB get away with lying to everyone that they will use unlimited resources to protect the peg then out of the blue drop it?