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Couldn't have said it better myself. There's a current thread where the poster pasted in the chat or email from IB and the IB rep actually capitalized the Algorithm when referring to it! You can't make this shit up.

You're playing the SHLD game too? I went with puts so that wouldn't happen, but they were so expensive that even though it's working out I won't make a ton from them.

I would think it would only be worse with a credit union. I have a couple different credit union accounts to take advantage of their good loan rates and because it's nicer working with them. However when I try to use them for regular banking, anything over a couple grand is treated like the...

I guarantee if I offered a hundred U.S. dollar bill for a coffee I'd be served in every single coffee shop in Vienna, or any other city in the world except maybe Pyongyang. Or I could go no more than a city block from any coffee shop in Vienna and withdraw Euros from my USD account at an ATM and...

You may find it interesting to know that if you'd invested that 1913 dollar in a 10 year treasury, which is what anyone with half a brain does with a dollar they plan to pass to their descendents instead of burying it in a box, you'd have a 14,771% return...

Ever try to eat an ounce of gold? Make a car or an airplane out of it? Use it for anything useful at all? It's value, absent a few niche practical applications, is entirely based on the arbitrary value it's assigned and in that way is no more "backed" by anything than dollars or bitcoins. I...

So you work in IB's "customer service" department I see, where the ability to form rational thoughts is apparently optional.

If a broker has a max loss of $5,000, in any circumstance whatsoever including a nuclear bomb going off, and wants more than $5,000 in margin you don't see that as an issue? You think it's the customer who is at fault? I think the real question is "What part of IB do you work in?"

IB has been doing this particular bit of madness for years. There's no reason to believe it indicates any financial distress on their part, it's merely rank stupidity.

SPX options are not options on futures. They are cash settled options on the SPX index. I think you may be thinking these are ES FOPs, they are not. They are a completely different and admittedly somewhat unique animal that CBOE has for a few different indexes. You are paid (or pay) the...

SPX are cash settled options, which doesn't involve any delivery of the underlying like a stock option or FOP. The most you could ever lose on a 1350-1300 spread is $5,000, so yes, anyone with $5K should be able to open a 50 point SPX spread at any broker and it will expose the broker to...

This is SPX, it's European exercise, no early exercise, no assignments, cash settled. Could be that IB doesn't grasp that, but not a legitimate reason for their margin settings. It's funny that everyone is assuming Occam's Razor is that it's the customer's misunderstanding, when the truth is...

It's like I'm psychic! IB is predictably irrational, they never fail to disappoint. I like how they even capitalize it, "the Algo" like it's some kind of god or something.

This type of thing happened to me all the time when I traded SPX spreads with IB, it's one of the prime reasons I'm no longer with them. Obviously "the algorithm" has an error. However their customer service people are too stupid to grasp the maximum loss in a spread and are taught that "the...

And I'm a grumpy old man (Gen X)! But I do have some spectacular millennials working for me, so I bristle a bit with the "kids these days" crap I hear from my contemporaries.

Actually the dollar is backed by a government that is willing and able to do all manner of things to ensure that it's value doesn't fall to 0. Bitcoin is not. In that way they are vastly different. I've got no horse in the bitcoin race other than interest in the block-chain technology, so the...

Spoken like a grumpy old man.

If you can correctly predict volatility, you can make money without whipsawing yourself around in the market. If you can't predict volatility, no amount of whipsawing will allow you to make money. Correctly predicting is what earns money, not the way you enter and leave the market, end of story.

Remember these are FX options, not spot. The spread for FX options was always massive when I've looked, way more than 5 pips.

That's interesting, so these "respected scientists" have proven that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere most certainly don't cause climate change? Or done any original research in that area at all? Or they've simply questioned some of the basis (one could say an "infinitesimal" part of the...