IB buying power

Bob:

I missed the "Special Margin." I see someone posted reference to it earlier. As I previously posted, I don't trade or invest in corporate bonds. It appears that every bond in the world is in IB's special margin list. I scanned the list.
There are, as I post, 1,277 "special margin bonds."
652 are 35% long maintenance margin,
245 are 50% long maintenance margin,
68 are 70% long maintenance margin, and
312 are 100% long maintenance margin.
All 1,277 are 100% initial and short margin.

Are all your bonds of the 100% long variety?

I still think IB's management performed inadequately if they failed to ensure that customers holding bonds were not informed of the change.

I generally trade futures and during the period of great market volatility IB was constantly changing the day-trade margins with no notice. Lots of complaints here on ET. Towards the end of the period of volatility they started to provide a day or two notice of the changes.

Jack
 
in a product section -there is 10511 bonds listed in valuebond exchange(the biggest one)
and there is 11325 bonds listed on special margin bond page.
so-it would be safe to say that there is ALL bonds are on this "special margin" list,where 100% INITIAL margin rate is applied to ALL new or existing positions.
sad, make no sense ...but true.. typical IB's approach..deal with it, or if you don't like-f** off.
 
Quote from Bob111:

...
there is another "new rule" in town(for those,who suggest to liquidate bonds positions)-your order will sit on IB's server (status will be "submitted", mean accepted by exchange, according to IB definitions of status colors) and will not be submitted to exchange until there is BOTH BID AND ASK presented on this exchange from some third party. that is-you can' t just place an order to sell your existing position at any price.
...[/B]
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This is simply not true, there does not need to be both bid and ask. For selling a bond, presence of a bid is obviously required. There's an additional compliance requirement that there's more than 1 bid present for the sell order to execute, either both bids at the same dealer or at two different dealers. When only one bid is present, you can solicit the second one by using RFQ feature of TWS (right-click the bond, request for quote).

This requirement affects both regular orders and liquidations. This is not new, the requirement has been in place since 2005 bond launch at IB.

Quote from OldTrader:
If these bonds are listed on the NYSE (there used to be a bond exchange), you should be able to get a quote.
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FYI, NYSE bond trading seems to be much lighter than it used to be: e.g. on Fri there were 3 trades.

http://www.nyse.com/bonds/nysebonds...l.html?jsfile=dailybonds_06262009&archid=true
 
Quote from Bob111:

in a product section -there is 10511 bonds listed in valuebond exchange(the biggest one) and there is 11325 bonds listed on special margin bond page.
so-it would be safe to say that there is ALL bonds are on this "special margin" list,where 100% INITIAL margin rate is applied to ALL new or existing positions.
More...
Bob:

Sorry my analysis was just for US Bonds in IB's special margin list. As I indicated above, more than half the US bonds remain at 35% long margin.

Have you checked your bonds against their list? It should match the numbers that you see in the Margin Report I mentioned earlier. If it doesn't I'd ask Customer Service why.

Jack

Edit: Just looked back at one of your previous posts. You said the Margin Report showed your bonds at 35%. Absolutely check against Special list, confirm, and then call CS. If you are correct, IB has a bigger problem than failing to inform their customers (of which I am one) about the bond change.
 
For selling a bond, presence of a bid is obviously required.
More...

i'm not sure,why it's so obvious..why i can't place sell order at my price and just sit and wait for buyer to come? is it a must for used car dealership to have buyers in place, and only then they can show them the price of the car? or they can post the prices in newspaper and wait for buyers to come? what i'm tying to say that IB broke the principles of trade. and you just confirm it.
once again-why buyer must be presented, if seller want's to place an order?

Response to your Trouble ticket #790493 created on 2009/06/25 13:10 EST

Response from mattm at 2009/06/28 16:04EST:



If, at any time, traders are unable to close positions by entering orders in the TWS they should call into the trade desk (877-442-2757 option 1) in order to close positions. In order to ensure that bond orders are executed in an orderly manner, the following conditions must be met before an order will execute via our internal bond matching system We will only execute an order on IBBOND if 1. there is a Bid & Ask from any other BOND dealer ( BONDBBO) and.. 2. the IBBOND Bid/ask is between the BONDBBO. If there are any additional questions please feel free to post a response and I would be happy to provide any additional information/clarification. If the details provided address the issue, we would appreciate the ticket being closed through the Message Center in Account Management (TWS >> Help >> Open Message Center). Regards, Matthew
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Quote from Bob111:

i'm not sure,why it's so obvious..why i can't place sell order at my price and just sit and wait for buyer to come? is it a must for used car dealership to have buyers in place, and only then they can show them the price of the car? or they can post the prices in newspaper and wait for buyers to come? what i'm tying to say that IB broke the principles of trade. and you just confirm it.
once again-why buyer must be presented, if seller want's to place an order?
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ValuBond/TradeWeb bond dealers are similar to FX dealers in that they accept only marketable orders: hence what MattM wrote is that your non-marketable orders can only be parked at internal crossing IBBOND engine (which is a recently added feature). The bid/ask requirement he wrote is for internal crosses on IBBOND only.

You can park your order on IBBOND and wait for another customer to come. You can still execute against dealer when there's one-sided quote only.
 
This is simply not true, there does not need to be both bid and ask. For selling a bond, presence of a bid is obviously required. There's an additional compliance requirement that there's more than 1 bid present for the sell order to execute, either both bids at the same dealer or at two different dealers. When only one bid is present, you can solicit the second one by using RFQ feature of TWS (right-click the bond, request for quote).

This requirement affects both regular orders and liquidations. This is not new, the requirement has been in place since 2005 bond launch at IB.
More...

ok..go head and try that,before you suggest( use RFQ on bonds)
 

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Bob:

Your screensots show three bonds. If I read the Special Margin list correctly the:

"F" bond is for USL Capital Corp - they show as 50% long maintenance margin.

"MFCCN" is for John Hancock Life Insurance Co - they show as 35% long maintenance margin.

"SLMA" is for SLM Corp - they also show 35% long maintenance margin.

You claim IB is maintaining a 100% requirement. How does Customer Service explain that?

Jack
 
i'm not claiming anything, it's a fact. here is what's on one actual account. you can see size,rating,etc. notice buying power. i also don't understand, why those bonds are in stock column(market value row) and why unrealized PnL is just a sum of them. IB is saying that they change this during the time,when volatility and uncertainty was high. but unfortunately for me-they newer reverse those changes. as i said-why no to release a portion of it? 10-20-30%? it would be better than nothing..
 

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