There is a nice guide on the forum somewhere. You sell CHF for USD. I do it as idealprofx if I remember the name correctly. I don’t wait.
That’s what I do. I tried both selling CHF.USD and buying USD.CHF and it always takes 2 days to settle.
It might be that you have less than 10k chf
Not in cash… Does that matter?
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Step for step guide:
you welcome! 
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Update in case anybody was interested: I ended up downgrading to a cash account because I realized that I’m not yet ready for a margin account. To be honest I am still not entirely sure what was going on, hence the downgrade. Here is what I told IB and what they replied.
Me :
I just recently opened my account and I am not completely certain yet how to trade with a margin account. Here is what I did: I transferred 1700.- CHF and then bought USD.CHF with it. Then I bought the VT ETF with my new USD. However after I completed the trade I started to receive notifications about my margin-cushion being critically low. Currently my account shows a margin of 1600. Could you explain to me why I am now on margin even though I had the funds to cover the trade? Or have the trades not settled yet and the margin will go away as soon as they did?
IB Reply:
Your IBKR account is a Reg T Margin account. Our system will calculate the Initial and Maintenance margin values for all margin accounts in order to calculate the other Available For Trading values (like Available Funds, Excess Liquidity etc). Initial Margin does not necessarily imply you have borrowed funds for trading.
Even though, you have positive cash balance remaining, i.e you have not borrowed funds from IB yet , the system deducts the margin requirements of your positions to calculate the Available funds and excess liquidity.
Kindly note that since your account value is below 2000 USD, it acts like a Cash account. Due to this, you are not receiving margin benefits. Therefore, the available funds and excess liquidity has dropped and you are receiving the margin cushion notifications. In order to avail margin benefits, your account value should be above 2000 USD. Margin cushion notifications are sent out when the excess liquidity drops below a certain threshold level (about 10% of your NLV).
Thanks for sharing.
Does anybody know what happens in a 90% market crash spike?
For example my portfolio is 50k in VT (which I bought with my own USD (no margin, no leverage)) and my margin requirement shows it is 10k.
Now with a 90% crash my portfolio is only worth 5k. Does my VT get auto-sold because I am under the margin requirement?
@essential I would imagine that - as long as you don’t have a negative cash balance (i.e. you don’t use your margin) - nothing bad should happen…
(edit) interesting article on margin, especially the last part about the regulations.
With a maintenance margin of 25% the current value of your portfolio should exceed at least 25% the money the broker has borrowed you; if it goes below you receive the margin call -> the broker ensures that the borrowed money will be recovered
Hi there
Anyone also received the following message from IBKR?
What is this all about?
Thanks and cheers,
P.
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If you borrowed money against your portfolio, you might be in deep shit, because the collateral value of VWRL will be zero.
If you didn’t, then you can ignore this message.
I like how they flagged this potentially disastrous message as
Priority: NORMAL
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I didn’t receive any notification so far, even if I hold a quite big position in VWRD (same as VWRL but denominated in USD) and I’m using a non negligible amount of margin…
Let’s see if I receive something in the next days… in case, I would close the position and transfer to VTI.
But imo it’s very bad news and I don’t honestly see the reason… moreover, I agree this should be a high priority message… 
I have already seen a message like that and I assumed it was because of the low trading volume of the CHF version. I guess if you did not get any warning you should be fine.
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Thanks for posting the screenshot. A few days ago someone wrote about this in another thread, and since then I was wondering why they did it. So it looks like VWRL, at least the one that is traded on SIX, has too low of a trading volume to meet certain FINRA liquidity requirements. That makes sense.
That’s the difference. They do NOT set this restriction per security (or per ISIN, if you will), but per security+exchange combination.
When I log into the paper account and try to trade, it tells me the following.
Ticker / Stock Exchange / Initial Margin / Maintenance Margin:
- VWRL / EBS SIX Swiss / 100% / 100%
- VWRL / AEB Euronext Netherlands / 31.25% / 25%
- VWRL / LSEETF / 31.25% / 25%
- VWRD / LSEETF / 31.25% / 25%
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Can someone explain me this? I tried to experiment with margin in a paper account.
Here are the margin requirements:
And here is the trade preview. I made an order to buy 10’000 shares @ $197.33.
So it tells me that my initial margin is higher than my equity.
I have two questions:
- how come is the initial margin 40% (on some other stock it’s even 25%)? Doesn’t Regulation T require at least 50%?
- how did they calculate initial/maintenance margin for this trade? when I do the maths, initial margin is 55% of the position, and maintenance is 50%. This are not the numbers they specify above.
Edit: I found this:
What is concentration margin? Anybody?
That comes separately on the whole portfolio and is typically checked overnight.
That I don’t understand. Did you try to execute the trade? Will you get an error message?
I guess it is applied if your portfolio is too concentrated on few positions, like holding one volitile stock of a certain company presumably making money by producing electric vehicles.
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But that would be very nasty. If it initially let’s you buy with 25%, but overnight you need 50%? Then what’s the point of having initial & maintenance margin lower than 50%? Does it only apply to the first night after purchase? This would mean an initial margin of under 50% would only make sense for day traders, who would sell before the day is over?
Yes, I get the error right away when I hit preview. It really does calculate the margin as 55% and 50%.
Yes, by googling quickly it seems to be the case. If you hold too much in a single position, your margin requirements are increased. But there is no logic specified anywhere, and these concentration margins are not displayed in the app…
BTW I tried with MSFT, it said the margins are 25% / 25%, but the effectively calculated amounts were 33% and 30% respectively.
Day trading.
No, every night. Normally you would get a 25-30% margin requirements with Portfolio margin, but in this case I don’t know what to expect.
Well, then I am somewhat relieved 
Once you have an actual position open, your margin requirement for this position as well as for the whole portfolio will be shown. I think that preview just doesn’t take into account all details properly.
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If, according to Reg T, 50% is the minimum equity required every night, then why is it called initial? And what’s the point of maintenance margin at 25%? When does it kick in? Instantly at any time of day?
I don’t see how this relieves you :). It would be good to know the margin requirements a priori and have some place where you can always see the percentages for a given asset. If you make a trade and then check the margin amounts, you have no guarantee that they will remain like this.
Hi Bojack, open the app, in your positions, select the one of interest to you, right hand side select more, scroll down under Market Data, there is a section for Margin Requirements