not a BFD.. the list is small anyway..it's not a first time they doing it. not sure why now. i understand margins while vix skyrocketed to 100 ,but now?
The last time i looked at the vix a week or two ago it was 15. Shocked to see today its almost 20 ?? And the S&P is only about 2% off its all time highs! Where is the VIX going to be if we see a real sell off?? Things could get real volatile real quickly..
you got that right. with shrinking volume,bigger than ever spreads on small\low volume stocks and less and less participants\REAL liquidity on the markets things might get ugly very quickly.
Why did they do this now? The list in reality is much bigger, not sure why they chose to only mention those few. It's as if they're actively trying to kill all trading in equities...
?? Pretty sure the 100% margin requirement has been going on for a while, I def faced the issue this year a couple of times already. Also it's like 50% margin requirement for small caps below 500mil I think, but it takes a while for IB to adjust the margin requirement once the capitalisation gets past 500mil. I suspect that after IB loss in Singapore it will tke even more time frm now on
There's a much longer list on IB's website of stocks requiring 100% maintenance margin, possibly the list posted in the link above only considers stocks beeing newly included
The 100% margin stocks list has exploded, it includes over 10 000 names as of now - it even includes NBG (National Bank of Greece) with a market cap of over $15 bil. It would make more sense for them to list the stocks one CAN buy on margin instead. I wonder how other brokers are in comparison, I'd be willing to pay more in commission to get decent margin. I get the need for this for small caps (below 250mm) but so many of the names have market caps in the billions.