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What type of portfolio holdings do you have? Options, stocks, etc? I do appreciate warnings like this, but more details are always helpful. FWIW, I see my IB margins unchanged presently, but I have mostly US stocks.

I read all the relevant changed sections. One thing I noticed was that if you couldn’t afford an options exercise or assignment, they could sell or close or lapse your contract if they felt like it near expiry.

Nasdaq is trying to force thru that stuff by including in their listing standards, first with mandatory disclosure of people’s race / sexuality / gender-related mental confusion, and if that goes well, second with delisting threats. Of course their economic arguments for why it’s so great are...

Sell dreams to retail. And also stock.

Depends on your broker. Many will treat warrants like stocks. Some like IB treat them like options and at least some times will cross margin them against holdings in the stock or its options.

Look at how your favorite baby bonds did back in Mar-Apr’20 and you’ll see the risk. Lots of stuff fell by half or more.

Citi - hold my beer. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-09/citi-says-it-knows-of-another-bank-making-big-payment-error

Interactive, Etrade, Lightspeed, Centerpoint, and Guardian might meet most to all of your requirements.

Your favorite money market mutual fund owns a lot of this. https://www.sec.gov/files/primer-money-market-funds-commercial-paper-market.pdf

The latest problem with IB is they decided you can’t withdraw money to more than 3 destination banks. So if you have another brokerage or two that you might want to send funds to, or couple of bank accounts, pretty soon you’re out of slots. This is a recent, customer unfriendly policy no doubt...

Usually IPOs are available for trading the first day at IB, but this was an exception sadly, perhaps due to the nontraditional IPO process. This time it said “restricted: new contract” for RBLX. Sometimes chart data works, separately from trading, sometimes not. In this case not. it should...

Depends on your broker. If you end up short from options and the broker doesn’t have a locate, in my experience you have to cover on that day / Monday. When exactly depends on the broker if they do it themselves near the start of day, if they tell you to do it, or what.

For GME, IB had shares available recently and tons of shares until this recent second move where they still had some. If it did run up a lot, shares would probably become unavailable for additional short selling. what happens to your short in that case? IF your lending counterparty sells...

Probably not, judging by the other IB order “protection” measures. I ran into this too, but re-placed the orders and got a few fills on GME options yesterday.

Well that depends why it went up and how much, but if you held GME short from $25 at a 1% position you’d hit 20% at $500 and it sure was worth holding on for that -90% crash since. But no, I wouldn’t have a 20% sized short, or anything close to that, without some nearly perfect hedge. However...

Yes. In the short term, gains on ES (mixed) are taxed less than SPY (all short term) and similarly losses on ES (mixed) are worth less than SPY (all short term). Consequently, a hedged trade in ES vs SPY is a complicated way to guess the direction of the overall market. If you could do that...

Yes, but run the numbers on what happens if your 10% short squeezes up 2x and is now a 20% short. The margin call will be more than the whole value of your account!

I wonder how much these guys lost in account blowups. These new rules are effectively 1000%+ margin requirements on all short positions. Talk about squeezing your customers with your own rules...

If I’m going to “park cash”, I don’t want a 30% loss while I do it like last spring. https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=PFF&ty=c&ta=0&p=w

Yes, assuming your holdings are mostly PM-eligible (which depends on the broker, but mostly liquid ETFs and large cap stocks should be), you would be able to take a bigger max DD before a margin call since your PM margin requirements were lower.