I'm looking to apply for an Interactive Brokers Margin account in the next few months. I understand they are a serious broker who aim for the professional trader market, so I want to make sure I have everything covered.
For someone starting around the minimum deposit, I'll be applying for Reg T - is this correct?
I've seen blog posts and in chat that they can be fickle about approving accounts or sometimes will approve a cash account but not a Margin account?
What questions do they ask about your income and assets?
For choosing deposit method in the application I would think international wire transfer is the most obvious?
I've heard there is this condition: 'You must have executed at least 100 trades for any product type, or 100 simulated trades in our real-time demo'. Is this correct? I currently have 50 real trades across Schwab and SureTrader, and doubt I'll hit 100 before I apply for IB.
Thanks!
Just say whatever is necessary to pass the application. The system tells when you don't qualify and then just change your answer to make it work. All that application is doing is trying to make sure you arent a professional trader that trades other peoples money for a living and you are trying to pay non-professional fees and rates and slide by all of the rest of the stuff that the professional traders have to go through. It isn't meant to weed out novice traders.
Thanks all for sharing your experiences. I'm a little bit OCD so was probably over thinking things too much.
Postscript: Looks like my concerns were 100% accurate. IB have only given me a 'Trading' (cash) account I can't short and I can't change the account type in the configuration. There was NOTHING in the application where I could choose this. Waiting to hear if they will change the account type for me. Seem like they randomly fuck people over.
Post Postscript: So IB customer support tell me I CAN short. .......'We can see that you have a trading account with IB-AU entity. In trading account, shorting is allowed. You can place an order to short on any of our trading platforms'.......how confusing
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