SHLL ticker change to HYLN increased margin requirement a lot

Before merger, SHLL warrants hedged short calls.
After merger, HYLN warrants don't hedge short calls

So my maintenance margin went from 80k surplus to 40k deficit literally overnight without the price of anything changing.

Is this a common occurrence, that a ticker change results in a completely different margin formula for the same company? How soon will they fix it?

 

Best bet is to contact support via chat and ask them if they can fix it. Don't count on the situation resolving itself quickly even though there's a decent chance it will in my experience.

IB may rely on third party information to determine cross margining and may have to involve the third party to fix, which adds time. I had a similar issue related to a data feed glitch once and the resolution took a few days as support couldn't resolve on their own due to compliance controls.

 

I sent an email to the OCC and they replied that they'd fix it today.

 

I ran into a margin issue when one of these SPACs changed their ticker also. It went from being about 1/3 requirement to 100%. I think this is because IB sometimes starts at 100% margin until they get some trading history on it, or they think it’s an IPO insteaad of a ticker change or something. In a few days, it reverted back to the old requirement. I’m not sure my bringing it to their attention helped that process or not.

 

In this case it was because the HYLN warrant wasn't in the HYLN class file at the OCC.

 

Now it's fixed on the OCC's end. I just pinged IBKR to fix it on their end.

 

What's the hold-up? The OCC's PMC says the HYLN warrants have been in the right class since Monday. The problem is on IBKR's end. This is costing me a lot of money in missed opportunities.

 

So, there's still no consistency in the amount of margin it requires to go long a SPAC and short the warrant or vice versa. For some spacs it's almost zero, and for others it's fully additive, and for others it's in-between. And every single SPAC will have an interval after the merger where its margin becomes purely additive because the OCC is slow to update their lists when the name of the ticker changes. Do all brokers depend on the OCC for setting their margin requirements?

 

Also is there any broker that will let me have a little margin on GBTC so long as I'm not too concentrated. Uncorrelated assets shouldn't have fully additive margins. The margins in general seem excessive when you're diversified, but too low when you YOLO all in on BABA.