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IB flags certain securities as "closing only" for various business reasons unrelated to clearing issues. Some penny stocks for example, some things with DTC restrictions, non-standard options, etc. You can still generally close those positions, just not open new ones.

In school, I used to play those video games that were complex resource optimization problems. Now I play I similar game for real money. Kids could learn some of this stuff if they spent half the time they put into Minecraft.

Sounds like a new, more progressive way for the post office to lose money. The reason banks don't provide services to those people is because it's unprofitable.

The best they could come up with was how the broker's self-trade prevention removed his older order when he changed his mind and went the other way? Weak.

I'm sure it never occurred to these anti-inversion advocates to make our corporate tax rate competitive internationally so companies would come here rather than v. Vs versa.

Thanks for the history. Do you remember how long before they went back to more normal margin requirements? At this point, I'm just guessing that senior mgmt is getting nervous about the market overall and this is their bad way of de-risking their brokerage business a little. You'd think the...

It's not worth the $5/month you'll save screwing around with free L1 feeds if you're already using IB. Obviously don't use the bats only NBBO for anything.

You saw my username, right? :). I normally run within 0-5% of the limits, which in this case was around 2-2.5x before the change.

I can see they increased initial margins for even big things like SPY by 10%, so instead of having the old 9% requirement, it's now 10%. Their 15% requirements for most stocks are now 16.5%. Said another way, if you were 2x leveraged on your holdings, you now have a 2.2x requirement and have...

Normally specific stock increases are notified with a phase in over a couple weeks. I did not get anything like that, so it's hard to tell. I think it's an overall increase, but I'm not sure.

For my portfolio margin account at IB, today my initial margin (but not maintenance margin) was much higher than it had been yesterday with no obvious change in positions. This caused my available funds to be large and negative, allowing no opening of new positions. Excess Liquidity, based off...

I've noticed a few glitches on startup or sometimes if you tweak a setting with charts, but if you close and reopen them they're usually fine. Some of the mouse-over fields don't pop up either. Minor annoyances compared to Windows/Linux, but not quite as good. I also suggest rebooting if you...

Yeah, I had one stock I was trying to buy and it was up ~30% from $0.10 to $0.13 x $0.16. The most they would let me bid was $0.12xx (less than the bid), despite over 100k in volume. It's something based off the prior day's close. You have to get a CSR to uncap every single order that you...

Worth what you pay for it, but not 100% accurate. If you care about getting every distribution adjusted, I know I've seen them not get some right and I would doubt they would handle things more complicated than a cash payout or a simple split correctly (spinoffs or other weird stuff).

Many brokers try to protect you from making money with risk checks like this designed to protect people from being morons. Frustratingly, they often don't have a general process to opt out of such "protections".

The gear/settings icon at the top right of the main screen lets you fix a few things. In particular, you may find the Application Settings->(General)->Look and Feel settings useful. The "Old TOS", spacing, and font size options can get you back most of the way to where things were before...

To be more optimistic, for those of you who like the new upgrade, what do you like about it and what can it do now that you find useful?

Ugh, yeah. They put in lots of extra headers and stuff that you can't minimize, so I can only fit only about 2/3 as many charts and such as before. Guess they'll get only 2/3 as much trading out of me, and I'll do the rest at other brokers. I hate the fact these things are mandatory upgrades...

I say the colleges should ban financial aid altogether - no more hand-wringing of which shade or impoverished background is most worthy of today's sensibilities. But then they would have to charge everyone the same price, and that price would have to be reasonable instead of massively inflated...

Do you use or know of a broker that offers decent margin requirements for Canadian equities? I use IB as a US individual and I'm told that for many stocks that would be 30-50% requirement with IB Canada, they aren't marginable at all for me due to how IB US is interpreting some SEC regulation...