IB portfolio margin account and open orders

TraDaToR

TraDaToR

Hello,

It is the first time I encounter this problem on stocks so I am clueless.

What is the maximum value of pending non-marketable limit orders you can submit with TWS on a portfolio margin account? Are you supposed to have money in case every single order is filled? Does it depend on what the aggregate pending positions should be if executed? Can you submit as much as you want and only actual open positions count?

Thanks.
 
Is it the same with Lightspeed? If you want to enter 100 buy orders and 100 short on the same exact tickers, is it the same as 200 buy orders on different stocks in terms of "pending "buying power?
 
Stock orders, yes. We set buying power on DT margin accounts at around 4X your equity and the trading platfrom will reject orders above that. For PM, around 6.6. Futures are a little different.

I'm going to email you too.
 
Last edited:
TraDaToR said:
Hello,

It is the first time I encounter this problem on stocks so I am clueless.

What is the maximum value of pending non-marketable limit orders you can submit with TWS on a portfolio margin account? Are you supposed to have money in case every single order is filled? Does it depend on what the aggregate pending positions should be if executed? Can you submit as much as you want and only actual open positions count?

Thanks.
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There is a limit, I recently encountered it. It's a margin multiplier but I forgot what it was (40x or something like that), you can ask CS for it. Your orders that are more than that are rejected.
 
d08 said:
There is a limit, I recently encountered it. It's a margin multiplier but I forgot what it was (40x or something like that), you can ask CS for it. Your orders that are more than that are rejected.
More...

I think you are referring to the GMV vs Equity limit. He is looking at PM limits, not banking limits.
 
No, I believe I'm talking about the maximum "amount" pending, what he asked. So you have a 100k account, you can only have something like 40 times your account size in open orders - IB assumes they are all at risk to execute even though they might be 50% away in blue chip stocks. It's based on excess liquidity but the PM isn't "intelligent" at all in that 2 trades with -0.99 correlation trades are counted the same as 2 trades with 0.99 correlation. A stupid approach to limit risk if you ask me.
 
I've run into this. I think it's a large multiple of your account equity or current buying power (10-20x?), certainly a lot more than you could support if everything filled at once. In practice, I only ran into it when I had a premarket order for a stock where there was no ask quoted yet. The system assumed the max $200k price per share and started rejecting any new orders until the market opened and the prices normalized. It was hard to find which open order needed to be cancelled so I could trade the premarket that morning.

Their risk system sometimes assumes a midpoint or some such price for a stock's margin requirement per share, which is prone to erroneous risk actions when things are illiquid and spreads are quite wide. If you ask me, a limit order to buy 100 shares at $5 shouldn't need more than $500 regardless of how high the ask is. But they clearly didn't ask me, since sometimes that order requires $10-20M when there's no ask :(.
 
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