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No, IB’s PM requirements are way better than most. Most others I’ve used or investigated are never lower than 15% (as IB is for larger ETFs), don’t have a risk offsetting system for crediting risk reduction on longs vs shorts, and have a much more limited set of “PM eligible” things (typically...

Generally IB margin requirements can increase as you increase your position, for example if your portfolio starts getting heavily concentrated, you start owning a non-zero percentage of all shares of the security, or if the overall IB ownership of a less liquid security exceeds their comfort...

You must have missed your alert. I received the email below on Dec 19th, one week ahead of the beginning of the margin requirements transition and three weeks before their full implementation. —— “You are receiving this communication because you currently hold or have recently held a...

I haven’t used that order type, but that error sounds like what can happen if you (or the algo) tries to enter a limit price with more decimals than the underlying market allows. For example, if you tried to place a buy order for a stock at $10.151 when only penny increments are allowed. Maybe...

To be fair, I said “not much doubt”, but let’s say you thought you had a high chance of -2% and a low chance of +2% depending on what happens across earnings or similar. On one hand, it’ll be hard to get enough data to be sure the odds really are say 4:1 in your favor or whatever, but on the...

My take is if you’re not sure whether you have an edge and need lots of fancy backtests and statistics, you probably don’t have that good an edge. Sure backtests and stats are useful tools and have their place (maybe you can aggregate multiple smaller edges into something reasonable and...

Commissions are pretty high on these too.

If you’re posting limit orders, you should use IB tiered commission schedule where you get rebates passed through from the exchanges that pay for limit orders that provide liquidity. This will reduce your commission and possibly even make it negative depending on which exchange and how much...

I think you might need to revisit your idea about shorting BIL for financing. See here: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=interest&p=secfinancing Basically your “short credit balance” (ie proceeds from short sales) is a different thing than cash, does NOT net against your...

Yeah, maybe for Reg T you can only get 2x overnight, I’m not sure. I think portfolio margin accounts might not have that restriction. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=26663 Other non-PM retail brokers seem to give a 30% requirement with no additional overnight after 30...

I guess you’re trying to do two things, get 1.75x leverage on a mutual fund, and engage in some financing maneuver to try to lower your margin cost? Because the easy thing would be to just wait 30 days, get 4x leverage on the first cash purchase, and now you can can buy another batch of the...

I seriously doubt any traders or hedge funds will go to Schwab from IB. Sophisticated traders know that free commissions aren’t worth the price of bad execution, and commissions are already quite low. IB has very good execution, Schwab not so much.

It’s official. Here’s their FAQ link on the merger https://www.amtd.com/news-and-stories/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/acquisition-information-center/default.aspx 12. Will Schwab retain TDAmeritrade’s tradingplatforms, specifically thinkorswim? It’s a bunch of weasel language and...

You could do that with TDA, but I haven’t had much luck with Schwab and with their non-transactional business model, they just not care that you trade a lot.

This is a good article on how ordinary income and long term gains interact, including lots of examples. https://www.kitces.com/blog/understanding-the-mechanics-of-the-0-long-term-capital-gains-tax-rate-how-to-harvest-capital-gains-for-a-free-step-up-in-basis/ Basically you should think of the...

If all you’ve got is wages and STCGs, you’re going to pay ordinary on everything, plus maybe NIIT/Obamacare tax if you do well enough on the short term gain portion. The preferential rates are only for long term gains.

$1M in pure long term gains would be taxed at slightly over 20% for example. Easy enough to run your simple scenarios through this tax calculator. https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/

Gone too I think.

For those who didn’t bother to read the article, the traders in question are likely going to jail, having plead guilty to criminal charges (except perhaps for the Chinese guy who probably fled the country). —- No, they made significantly less than that. Here’s another article with more...

Yes, I had noticed this also. I think the issue is that IB only provides most but not all exchange volumes, perhaps due to live data licensing issues(?). For US stocks, I find the Yahoo daily volumes more correct.