IB acct - converting half to euros

S

SideShowBob

I want to convert half the balance of my account to euros or GBP to protect against further slides in the dollar. This is not a forex trade per se as I plan to keep the funds in the foreign currency for a long time and I will not be converting back/forth (at least not often).

If I have say $20000 and I convert half to euros (so $10K USD and the rest in euros), then I want to buy 3 ER2 futures with a current margin of $4000 each, will I be borrowing $2K USD? I assume the answer is yes. But what happens if I do this in an IRA (assuming I have the IB margin IRA)?

- Will my trade fail for lack of margin?
- Or will IB automatically convert some cash back to USD?
- Or will I not be able to convert to Euros at all in my IRA?

SSB
 
Why not just hedge -- you'll be able to flip positions easily.

It takes a day for base currency changes to take affect I believe.
 
Quote from Div_Arb:

IB doesn't offer interest on the first $10k of your cash balance. This is in dollars, don't know about in Euros.
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It's about the same minimum in Euros adjusted for the exchange rate (for example it was $5500 for GPB). That's a good point, I'd probably want to convert all my cash, not just half....of course that's a different thing....
 
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