Portfolio Margin in IB

G

Gabriel2

Hi guys!
I have a question about trading PMA with IB.
Everyone knows about the extra initial & maintenance margins on futures (ES, CL) when trading with IB over the standard CME values, especially during high volatility periods.

When trading stocks on margin in PMA: Does IBKR uses different (higher) margin requirements over the OCC margin defined the previous day (TIMS model)?

Also please consider I'm not complaining about IBKR risk management policies, just for comparison purposes.

thank you!!
 
Yes, IBKR is using higher margins than TIMS for many but not all equity products. It depends from a quality of stocks, diversification and many other factors.
 
Nearly all stocks I checked including several megacap $10B+ ones had higher PM requirements than the 15% minimum. Many were 30-40%, some 50-70%. This is a recent change post the virus crash; before that IB was much better. Now their PM margin is quite poor and often no better than Reg T and definitely worse than other broker’s PM requirements.

In addition, they increased these PM requirements very rapidly and without warning or even contemporaneous explanation - every day for 1-2 weeks straight they’d raise your requirements 3-10%/day. Imagine trying to manage your risk if you didn’t know your margin requirements would be 20% or 50% in a week. Very disappointed.
 
That was my concern. But at least it was a gradual rise in requirements.
IB has a very nice "Risk Navigator" window to watch exposure, market scenarios (with a graph) and requirements. But it seems hard to manage risk even with a moderate leverage with those PM margins.
 
The Risk Navigator is good for when they announce a margin change and you can put in the future margin profile as a “what if” for future date YYYYMMDD. But these portfolio margin changes were not announced nor did they have any such profiles since they took effect each morning so you couldn’t plan ahead at all.
 
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