EUR/CHF wipeout/margin call ... negative balance ... what to do?

Maverick74 said:
The account will go into collections. They will come after you. They will ruin your credit. And make no mistake about it, not paying them will mean it will be extremely difficult to open a brokerage account ever again. The only way out will be bankruptcy. This is not a prop account. You are liable for your losses and you made that promise when you signed those brokerage statements that nobody ever reads. All brokers indemnify themselves from liability when you open the account and you signed a form agreeing to that. Do the right thing and honor your debt.
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Agreed. I would contact IB and they will work with you if you show good faith towards the situation. Sorry for your loss.
 
This is CHF future (USD.CHF) from IB charts

upload_2015-1-18_9-5-59.png


Anyone has tick chart. So the announcement was made around 2.30 time. Then someone out there decide to run all the stops because they have information everyone is shorting CHF.

Other pairs got hit is strange, NZD/CHF, USD/CHF. Unfortunately, there is no circuit breaker in Forex like DOW, Nasdaq.
 
Is the amount you allegedly owe to IB meaningful compared to your net Worth? Is it a threat to your family's finance?

I feel for you, man. Anybody should be in your boots here. Newbies but seasoned veterans as well. Stay strong.
 
loyek590 said:
ask a tax professional, I don't believe forex losses are restricted to 3k per year
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You are correct, they are not. You can claim them as a loss on income, as long as you did not opt in at the beginning of the year to treat gains as capital gains (not income).

I have personally claimed losses against income, been audited, and won the audit (The IRS didn't even understand their own law). Look up IRC 988.

This applies to SPOT forex, not futures.
 
Thanks for charts, chaps. I was contemplating shorting either swiss or euro against the dollar (futures) the evening before. Thankfully did not do the swiss (didn't do the the euro either which would have worked well!). From the above charts, i reckon i would have lost only 2%-3% (i tend to avoid leverage) of my fund in slippage, so would not have been catastrophic.
 
There was literally no orders until serveral 1000nd of pips later, no sellers so the price just ran straight to the first available order being hugely up there, it's a stupid way for a market to trade really. Not trading inbetween means your SL's go to market order, which means loads of buyers pushing it higher via market orders.


Hopefully they'll come up with a compromise, go 50/50 or something with you, in order to get some money back ??

No doubt they'll be working on it all weekend and Monday morning some time is going to suck.
 
OandA is forgiving its customers negative balances. They must be a dealer (aka, bucket shop) and these neg balances were just paper losses for them since they were the counterparty to the trades. So this was a good business decision on their part if they would have a hard time collecting anyway. And now they keep some of these customers who will continue to pay bid/ask spreads on future trades.

http://www.forexlive.com/blog/2015/01/16/oanda-wins-points-for-quickly-forgiving-negative-balances/
 
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