IBKR options margins

C

cyan-otter

I have a PM account, and I noticed that going long some options had over a 100% margin requirement. In some cases, buying an option had a 400% maintenance margin requirement. Am I missing something? Per my understanding, it is impossible to lose more than the amount of the option if I am long, so the maintenance margin should be at most 100%. What makes this weirder is that if these long options increased in value, because the maintenance margin requirement is over 100%, my margin buffer would actually decrease, possibly causing me to get liquidated. I chatted with support, but they were unhelpful. I am not doing any complex option strategies; I am buying calls and puts to predict price direction.

Am I missing something with my logic? Is this a known issue with IBKR? I have heard of more complex option strategies having unreasonable margin requirements, but I am not doing those, and it seems like it should be easy to cap the maintenance margin for long options to 100% of their value.
 
I had the same thing happen many years ago when they tagged Alibaba as "risky". In the middle of the day, they set that symbol to 2.5X base margin. When I called and asked why they also did that to a long vertical spread, they told me that is how their systems works.
 
The spread makes sense (I do not agree, but due to early excercise risk I understand), but a long call or put at greater than cost?

Now I am going to go look at the impact on my account, not that I will ever allocate more than 25% of my capital.
 
cyan-otter said:
I have a PM account, and I noticed that going long some options had over a 100% margin requirement. In some cases, buying an option had a 400% maintenance margin requirement. Am I missing something? Per my understanding, it is impossible to lose more than the amount of the option if I am long, so the maintenance margin should be at most 100%. What makes this weirder is that if these long options increased in value, because the maintenance margin requirement is over 100%, my margin buffer would actually decrease, possibly causing me to get liquidated. I chatted with support, but they were unhelpful. I am not doing any complex option strategies; I am buying calls and puts to predict price direction.

Am I missing something with my logic? Is this a known issue with IBKR? I have heard of more complex option strategies having unreasonable margin requirements, but I am not doing those, and it seems like it should be easy to cap the maintenance margin for long options to 100% of their value.
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Have you found any satisfactory answer or solution to this?
 
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