June 9th, 2011, 4:32 am
A lot depends on your strategy. If you are well-hedged and market-neutral then you will probably want to take advantage of portfolio margining since separate independent margining of each trade will eat up your account quickly.Most brokers require >$1m in an account for portfolio margining, but I think IB demand only $100K. When I enquired recently with a sample equity option portfolio, IB's portfolio margining apparently gave me leverage of 90:1!!! Of course it would be extremely risky to employ such leverage, but it is better to have that freedom than not.
Last edited by
Fermion on June 8th, 2011, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.