If you were forced to pick the safest place to hold money, where would you put it? This is assuming the 100k protection at banks is considerably less than your account size. Do you split up 100k and many banks? Do you keep it at IB? Other broker? Other bank? Online type bank? Opinions please. Fwiw, i think the safest place to hold my cash is IB given i collect reasonable interest, can short the USD while making some trades on the side. My main trading account is prop. What am i not considering?
If you have over $100K, and up to $10 million you could put it in a CDARS. No individual bank will hold more than $100K (after computing the interest generated during the terms of your CD). At maturity you do it all over again and the monies are reallocated to different banks. You only deal with one bank, your primary one as they allocate all the $$$ to the other banks under the program. PS - CDARS is Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service and all monies are fully FDIC insured
Their was a good article on it about a year or so ago. Here is the most recent one from Bloomberg.... http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aBaYKQD_UPcE