Maybe you check the settlement time for your ccy conversion. Trade is booked (so CHF is gone) but not settled yet (USD not yet available).
I never had problems but i don’t know if IB offers instant settlement.
I can confirm that I usually convert CHF to USD and then purchase stock in a single session. And I have a cash account. In the past I’ve done it in WebTrader by selling the CHF.USD, now I just use the Client Portal, which I’m pretty sure does the same behind the scenes. So it’s still a mystery why for some people it doesn’t work.
I also met this “error message” today. Have a cash account, FXCONV to USD.
What is interesting is that some instruments seem to be tradeable nonetheless, while others aren’t.
I could have bought a USD-ETF.
But couldn’t have bought a US-Treasury.
Interesting…
After having encountered a similar problem, I called the IB service today to investigate and think I might have found the issue. It seems fees are calculated in your base currency.
In my case I tried to convert EUR into USD. I also got the insufficient cash notification. The reason was that I had a balance of 0 CHF (My base currency).
Once I sent some CHF to my account the error messages disappeared. Accordingly, the solution might be to always have a sufficient amount in the base currency to cover transaction fees. Hope that helps!
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This has just started happening to me, there was an upgrade at the weekend?
normally when i transfer CHF/USD i can trade straight away, but today i see settled cash but cannot trade, quite frustrating.
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Happened to me the same last month, just wait 1 day and will work(can trade).
IKBR support said it was due to a CHF currency holiday and wait one day to trade, but the trade won’t be fulfilled until 5 days later, although it will be executed at the initial price. Never come across this before.
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Got fed up with this message and just switched all my cash only accounts to margin. What a hassle…
Maybe I was lucky with the currency holidays but I never got this message as much as this year.
Hi all
I had this today. I’m suspecting, it is because tomorrow is a Swiss holiday and it was after Swiss office hours. Could that be?
Cheers
If you are buying a stock for example, you need to have more money in your account than the cost of share at that exact moment becouse when order is being processed the price for share can change slighly or quite a bit, so financial portals require you to have that extra money to cover for that possible change between placing an order and when order is processed.
When I was trading on Trading 212 the message would show up explaining that.
Just wondering why people were not using margin accounts to begin with? Are there any downsides?
Margin interest and complexity.
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As long as you use it without leverage that remains simple 
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I’ll ask the opposite, are there any upsides of a margin account when you don’t plan on using margin? Also you have some “work” with filling out this form and enter some pseudo data about how much experience you have and how many transactions a year you do with different investing instruments to get a margin account unlocked.
You don‘t have to wait for funds to settle when you deposit or exchange (though you then technically would use margin).
I also didn’t need to wait for funds to settle with a cash only account most of the time. But as I wrote I was not patient enough and just switched to margin when the “funds haven’t settled” message started to pop up more frequently.
Maybe IBKR “offered” to bridge the money for free for cash only accounts? I can’t remember if we ever got a solution on this forum on why “the funds haven’t settled” popped up besides the currency holidays.
There’s a 2 or 3 day delay for settlement in a cash transfer order or a security order. With a cash account you can only use settled cash while with a margin account the funds are already available (even if not settled as the system considers them committed) but you may have to pay interests until actual settlement if you use the funds in between especially if the order you key has a shorter settlement period.
Fyi that’s not my experience. I can always buy immediately after the wire is received. And I don’t have issue doing currency exchange + stock sell+buy on the same day.
What matters is that settlement dates should line up (and you don’t break free riding rules, so don’t buy+sell the same security on the same day).
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Just had the same issue. I sold today some stocks traded in Yen and converted it to USD. I see the money but I can’t use it. In the past this was never an issue, the money was immediately available after the conversion. Kind of sucks.
Haven’t read up on the history of this topic (so this might have been discussed before), but from the looks of it, wouldn’t this be just the result of the T+2 settlement period?
You sell your stock today (trade date) and your cash arrives two business days later (value date).
I’ve even encountered this at Swissquote before.*
* Your cash shows up immediately on the balance, I guess for optics, but isn’t really there and usable until the value date.
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