try speedtrader...i am just a wanna be trader but i have used them [when i get to trade] for yrs. maybe they won't work for u big time traders? i don't know? i think they are really good!
Anyone know if it is just their computer that does it?Does a human even look at the account before the computer butchers it?
I'm sure it's fully automatic. I've had a few incidents where i got more fills than expected, and I've generally seen IB liquidate within seconds. In my experience, they only liquidate enough to get below BP, not everything.
i think it is all automatic. nobody wants to rely on humans when the market crashes and 1000s accounts are over-leveraged. i was liquidated a few times when there were problems with MOC orders. once it was my fault when i did not submit enough orders to meet the overnight reg-T. the other time i think island went down and IB assumed that one of my large MOC order routed to island simply did not exist. from the above experience i noticed that after liquidation i was significantly net SHORT. this seems to make sense because there is less risk of adverse market move if one is short. but let's say the market is tanking at the close 10%, they liquidate you and you are net short. now fed cuts overnight and you are double screwed! bottom line: always have enough margin!
I was liquidated in the last 10 minutes once and IB just sold enough to cover margin. The problem was I already had MOC orders to close all the positions. The liquidation caused me to reverse my positions when my MOC orders executed. It cost me a few hundred dollars getting out of the unwanted positions. This was a few years ago.
Say, aren't you the guy who is always preaching about how the government should let the banks fail because they made stupid mistakes. Oh wonderful irony.
I just spoke recently to IB about MOC orders and was told that MOC orders are factored in when calculating if you're account is within their overnight margin limits. I've used MOC orders everyday for months now and have yet to be liquidated, even when leveraged to the hilt. So, if this happened a couple of years ago, they must have addressed the issue.
The bottomline is that they don't liquidate unless you're under maintenance. Like someone else said, it's one thing if they liquidated $100K in positions for $1100 under maintained. But I doubt that's what happened. My guess is you've got a small account, probably very few positions. Without the details it's very difficult to comment, except to say that if you're going to overleverage yourself, then outsized moves are going to nail you. OldTrader