Ok so they just admitted that the *mark* (ie. settlement) prices are the best way to judge risk. Is that what they did? According to your prior account, no. So you already have them contradicting themselves. That is the kind of thing that you would need for a claim against them. Have you asked them to open a *formal* dispute? Until you do that, you are just chatting with them.
let me say that I will politely disagree with you. First the ib margin calculations do not liquidate willy nilly. They liquidate to get you more margin. I have seen how ib will liquidate short option positions while leaving the long option position intact. To get the real benefit to ib you need to activate portfolio margin. Then you need to calculate the var of your portfolio. If you stick to that you will not have problems. And here is a question for you how do you know the yuan valuation was not right? Only when looking forward do you see that.
Portfolio margin is for stocks and has no effect on futures margin. Actually you can tell when the Yuan futures bid is out of line by looking at the price of the underlying instrument which trades elsewhere and is more liquid.
Some of these markets may not be truly illiquid, though they may be illiquid when some major regular markets are closed. Futures/forex stays open when regular markets are close. It is during these time I am concern that IB auto-liquidation robot closes my swing positions. In any case, I have a way to work around this craziness until I am setup to trade with EOC.
When they talk about *mark*, they mean the mid-price. In earlier communication in the ticket, they refer to a "mark price of 0.143935 (based on the midpoint)" [between bid and ask]. Thanks everyone for their useful comments and for making me aware of arbitration and the formal IB complaints procedure. I didn't know the distinction between a regular ticket and a formal complaint ticket. I've filed a formal complaint ticket today; in the next step I'll complain to the FSA ombudsman (that's some additional possibility for me as I live in the U.K. and am therefore with IB UK). Then I can still go into arbitration.
Look up the 20 largest FCMs by seg funds at the CFTC site. I've deal with a third to a half of them, and never been auto-liquidated. Or, save a dollar or two a contract all year, then give the savings back 10-fold when you're liquidated, if you find that entertaining.
That's good because it may encourage IB to reexamine its procedures and hopefully eventually adopt improvements to its liquidation procedures along the lines that have been suggested here.
IDS you should take greater care in making statements regarding IB policy. You also stated the following: Please take a moment to correct any statements that might provide an investor with a false sense of security with respect to your unique auto liquidation software.
Don't expect an answer from these IB people, they never give a clear answer re margin/autoliquidations, of the last 10 pages there was 2 disingenius responses from 2 IB people, when pressed for more answers these people disappeared. But lately I have been answering some liquidation questions for them here on ET, so I will answer this one as well. The second statment is totaly false, the first 1 seems to be correct.