IBKR how do you make a request to short a stock that isn't available?

If you are willing to pre-borrow and pay a fee regardless if you trade the stock, then you can use the tools available.

Pre-Borrow is still reserved for portfolio margin customers. And portfolio margin isn't available to Canadian customers (even trading US equities). So Someone like me simply doesn't have access to the pre-borrow functionality. And I got a flat "NO" when asking about any locate functionality when asking IB support.


For the US markets if you have an offer on the screen, the SLB team will seek the stock and if they can locate it, will make it available. Naturally info such as size, history of the client, etc are factors. Small caps by their nature are hard to borrow.

So if you're a big enough customer you can just leave a live pending order on a HTB stock and IB will go do the external locate for you? I guess thats cool...But I really dont like the idea of leaving an order out there like that with no idea to know when it will be filled. I guess if its a limit it would work...but if you want to market in then you may just get filled at a random bad price. Cant wrap my head around how this workflow is supposed to work? Put a big limit order out there to sell a HTB stock...then you get that window that says contract is not available for short sale...then what?
 
At TradeZero, we make pre-borrowing and locating supremely easy. Our list of available shares for shorting is one of the most robust in the industry. All sourcing of shorts is done in real-time on our platforms, including web, desktop and mobile. We like to refer to our mobile locates as Gocates! We are commission free for stocks above $1 and the ACH in is also free.
 
At TradeZero, we make pre-borrowing and locating supremely easy. Our list of available shares for shorting is one of the most robust in the industry. All sourcing of shorts is done in real-time on our platforms, including web, desktop and mobile. We like to refer to our mobile locates as Gocates! We are commission free for stocks above $1 and the ACH in is also free.

Commission free other than selling order flow and 4x the overnight borrow rate and 5% margin.
https://us.tradezero.co/manuals/TradeZero-America-Rule-606-Report-Q4-2019.pdf

this is of interest:
APEX, LLC paid TradeZero America, Inc. on average $0.0006 per share with an average 21% profit-sharing fee
 
Yes, as with all other broker dealers our 606 reports are public. We make very little on PFOF. opting instead for better execution quality. Robinhood comparatively makes .0026 per share.

For those clients that want to trade DMA, we also offer that ability, where you would direct your own orders for best execution. www.tradezero.us/pricing for more info on Direct Routing
 
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