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If you want to avoid liquidation issues from opening or weekend gaps, just don't have the market close. Then you can pick a margin requirement that corresponds to whatever a big move is and how fast the broker can blow out the customer's position when he's getting close to a call and from the...

Not disagreeing about the bagholders having responsibility for their actions (company filings admitted they had no assets or operations weeks ago), but avoiding an overnight long position wouldn't have helped those daytrading in this case. Nasdaq slapped a T12 halt on them before the close and...

Capital gains or losses are based on what you paid vs what you sold for. Just because they go into default doesn't mean the bonds are worth zero - they will still trade and unless there's a bankruptcy process completed, the bonds aren't "worthless" yet. Remember there could be some recovery, at...

I don't know what you're talking about but the OTC order restriction is still there just as described by OP.

I would only buy AIEQ if my smart AI told me to.

Having corresponded with IB's investor relations about this issue, their stance is basically that the market maker(s) made this a requirement and given they want to do business with those market makers (Knight especially), both for larger OTC orders and for dark pool / internalization of listed...

"For certain" you would need a professional opinion, but here's something that suggests the answer to #2 is "no" if you're only trading for yourself. http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/finance/downloads/pdf/99pdf/004767rd.pdf

I don't think there's a problem with that and I know you can have several IB accounts. I don't know if he was gaming their risk system in some other way. At other brokers, when they noticed I had two margin accounts (one was joint), they politely asked which one I would like margin removed...

But if it was regulatory burdens related to allowing customers to trade OTC stocks, they would just ban all otc orders, not just smaller ones. It's clear this is coming from the market maker side, not the broker side.

No, you can't. Aside from AON orders getting generally poor execution, IB does not support the AON order type for OTC markets: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=577

That's true, but this change effects all OTC stocks. The required positions for higher priced stocks are much bigger. This is especially bad since IB used to be a good place to trade "real" stocks, not just penny stocks, that happened to be OTC. Now it's not. Also, even if you're offering to...

This doesn't just apply to penny stocks. 100 shares at $150 is $15k. What's your point? OTC execution under the new rules is much worse than it was before.

As an example of the various problems this new policy causes, suppose you want to buy 2500 shares, the minimum required for some penny stock trading $0.38 x $0.42. So you put in a limit order for 2500 bid at the mid $0.40 and get filled for 2000 shares. Now what? You can't offer to sell the...

Yes, I noticed this just recently as well and I agree with OP 100%. This is a very bad decision and very customer unfriendly, especially to implement it with no warning and with no provision for closing existing positions. I have many small positions, long and short, that I now have no way to...

Yes. OP got a recall, which gives you no warning and is relatively rare. More typical for a tight borrow situation would be a warning that the located shares have not yet been delivered the day before the deadline and that you would be subject to a buy-in the next morning if the locate failed...

But if the ask moves up to 4.85, now you've got an order at 4.80, higher than you wanted to pay.

A market order isn't going to get filled for 1 share. But probably your broker will have sold your order to some market maker who will give you $0.001 or less in "price improvement" rather than filling you at mid even when there's active trading there. Good to be a market maker, bad to be you...

Yeah, it can be annoying if the stock moves up since you can then get filled at the ask instead of the mid because you have to set your limit order set too high or it won't work at all.

That wasn't exactly what I was saying. I was saying it's harder to understand changes, not that PM requirements are more subject to change than Reg T requirememts. That can happen in any type of margin account - if volatility is rising, your broker may decide to increase the margin...

I don't have as much experience with options, but for equities a PM account is generally better. However, it's also a lot harder to figure out what happened or why when something changes with your available margin.