IB raising margin every week?

man...it's doesn't really matter...what matter is that they ALL investment grade bonds with CURRENT rating ABOVE BBB
what also matter is that for like 15 min my buying power is zero with nothing on margin and with some free cash on account.how is this possible? i was talking about it couple years ago and i think we are couple steps closer right now to event,when IB automated liquidation system will dump all of your holdings one day just because they are unable to calculate the risks correctly.
here is the picture from another account, where buying power is about 4K during the day for no reason at all. there is no trades during the day, absolutely nothing..shortly after market close it pop up to 6K.
i really like to know, how IB come up with 6K of buying power. on 46K account with 2K cash.
anyone from IB or not-enlighten me please...

Thank you!
 

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stock 777 were you the one who was sooooo bullish the stock market a while ago ??? now how do you feel ?

bgp
 
Quote from jeb9999:

Brokers are free to charge any margin at or above the exchange minimum for overnight positions.
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i know, they can do whatever they want, but..with no securities been bought on margin and some cash still on account how to hell i was unable to buy anything on at least on that amount of cash?
think about it- you have 50K, 5K out of it is in cash. even if you bought LEH stock on 45K and it's worth close to nothing-you still have your 5K cash. so the buying power should be at least 5K. i'm wrong?
 
Quote from bgp:

stock 777 were you the one who was sooooo bullish the stock market a while ago ??? now how do you feel ?

bgp
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dude, I haven't been bullish for more than 5 minutes at a time since 1972.

you got me confused with someone else for sure pal.


and how do you feel, since you sure don't think 2 well.
 
Quote from jwcapital:

It's the prudent thing to do. If the banks did the same thing in 2003-2005, we wouldn't of had the financial crisis. Ironically, the margin increase is for your own good--it forces you to keep more liquid funds available. Hate to see you have to sell your house to cover a margin call, like in the 28-32 era.
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In that case there wouldn't have been a bull market.

No bull market = No Reps in the White House
 
Quote from Bob111:

i know, they can do whatever they want, but..with no securities been bought on margin and some cash still on account how to hell i was unable to buy anything on at least on that amount of cash?
think about it- you have 50K, 5K out of it is in cash. even if you bought LEH stock on 45K and it's worth close to nothing-you still have your 5K cash. so the buying power should be at least 5K. i'm wrong?
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This thread started out about futures margin and my comment about margin over the exchange minimum was futures related.

After trying to make sense out of IB's account statements I figured out that the programmers who write IB's accounting software know nothing at all about proper accounting. What the IB programmers learned about accounting comes from reading upside down and backwards accounting books with missing pages that are written in foreign languages.

You would have to ask IB why your cash gives you no buying power. I couldn't even start to guess what the problem is, other than very poor accounting software.
 
I wouldn't complain about these margins, thanks for posting them
though since I hadn't looked at them in years.When I started trading ES back in 01, they were I believe around 6K eirther for NQ or ES, one was lower than the other. That was with the volatility back then. Intraday volatility looks 3 times higher now, I had never seen one-minute 10 point move in ES, I wouldn't be surprised to see those margins go to 10 K.

I stopped trading futures in 07, I wouldn't want to trade futures in this environment and I wouldn't want to have any significant leverage becAuse IB may liquidate you and you need to keep your powder dry especially if you are sitting on losing positions.

And yes IB is f*xked up. One more reason not to max out your buying power with them.
 
same account,no changes in holdings,few trades today.
still waiting for a clear explanation of IB's margin calculations from ANYONE, IB included.I'm having trouble to understand what i see..
 

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ps-there is no stock positions on account, no shorts of any kind. so-the cash in cash cell is a cash and i did not understand why is the buying power is LOWER than cash???
 
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