Closing Non-Base currencies in IB?

D

davidc123

Hi,

I've recently discovered that because the base currency of my IB account is GBP, the cash from any USD trades I make isn't automatically converted back to GBP once I close the position, so I effectively hold a GBP/USD FX position after every trade.

To get around this, every night I've been choosing 'Close all Non-Base currency positions' from the account dialog in TWS, which converts the USD from the trades back into GBP.

However every day when I start up TWS again I have another (sometimes large) GBP/USD position in my account, and it's usually lost some money.

No trades have occurred overnight so i'm very confused why this keeps happening, and I'm hoping someone else who use the multi currency accounts at IB can give some advice?

Thanks.
 
Quote from davidc123:

Hi,

I've recently discovered that because the base currency of my IB account is GBP, the cash from any USD trades I make isn't automatically converted back to GBP once I close the position, so I effectively hold a GBP/USD FX position after every trade.

To get around this, every night I've been choosing 'Close all Non-Base currency positions' from the account dialog in TWS, which converts the USD from the trades back into GBP.

However every day when I start up TWS again I have another (sometimes large) GBP/USD position in my account, and it's usually lost some money.

No trades have occurred overnight so i'm very confused why this keeps happening, and I'm hoping someone else who use the multi currency accounts at IB can give some advice?

Thanks.
More...

Thats why I don't us IB for forex. Its maddening. I got a small remnant of a yen trade over a month old and I can't get it off.

Check out MB Trading. I just opened an account with them. A friend of mine uses them.

I gave up on IB.

John
 
If you haven't had any activity but the balances change, the only thing I think it could be is the interest earned/charged which is based on settled cash and therefore from your actual balances a couple of days earlier. If you continue to clear out your USD each night, there should be no further overnight changes since no interest earned/charged.
 
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