Teruki

Hi, Sorry I should have followed up on this thread too. (I think) I figured it out and replied on the other thread about it that is linked in my OP. Essentially, we borrow USD every time we trade if we don't have enough USD in our account, but the exchange rate has nothing to do with it (At least it is the explanation I got from the IB chat support). Let's say you borrow $100US to buy a stock, and if you win the trade and get $110, then now you have $10US in your account. We borrow $100 in USD, you give back $100 to IB in USD, and have $10 extra. If you lose and sold the stock at $90, now you have negative -$10 USD in your account. There will be interest for this (negative amount - the same as credit or line of credit etc.). You could convert the negative amount of USD from your CAD easily. You could also convert entire CAD to USD but it is not really necessary and actually this would be more risky because of the exchange rate if your base is Canada and your goal is to have more CAD in the end. What seemed to have been an issue with the other thread is that your asset in USD (and it shows in USD in your statements if your base currency is USD) fluctuates depending on the exchange rate. Let's say you have $1,000 CAD in your account and it is about $750USD. If the CAD drops a lot against USD then it might become $730USD by the end of the day. In this case, even if you make $10USD, your statement in USD will be less than where you started (drops from $750 to $740USD). But what you have in CAD would actually be growing ($1,000 CAD plus $10USD equivalent in this case). At least this is my understanding. Anyone please correct me if I am wrong.

I chatted with an IB representative who was very helpful. In short, it seems like there is nothing to worried about when it comes to the exchange rate. I don't think you have to convert everything to USD (or deposit in USD) either. Here is an example. If I have $1,000 CAD and $0 USD and I want to buy a $100 stock, then I am borrowing $100USD from IB. At this point, I have -$100 balance in USD. If I have a winning trade and now I sell the stock at $120, then I have a $20 profit. My USD account balance now will be $20. If I lose and sell the stock at $80, then now I have -$20 balance in USD. For -$20, I will have to pay some interest to IB or you can convert the amount from your CAD balance. As you can see, there is no place for the exchange rate to come in because I would be simply trading in borrowed USD, not CAD that is converted to USD. However, the exchange rate changes every day and when it comes to the total balance shown in USD it changes every day even if you don't trade at all. With the $1,000 CAD scenario, if the USD/CAD exchange rate is 0.8, then your balance in USD is $800, but if the rate drops to 0.78, then the balance will be $780. You would still have $1,000 Canadian. If the CAD value drops significantly, then the total value of your balance in USD drops significantly too and even if you win some trades (in USD), you may have less USD equivalent (as your base currency) at the end of the day than when you started trading in the morning. I think it is what happened to the OP. But I believe you would still have your original CAD balance in your account (plus the positive USD won in the trades).

I was referred to this thread when I asked about the base currency of the IB on the other thread. I was about to deposit money to my new IB Canada account and I got concerned about this issue and I chatted with the IB representative. They said you could just exchange/convert everything from CAD to USD at once and done with it, and you don't have to borrow USD every time you trade. You can also deposit USD directly but it seems like you don't have to do that. I haven't deposited my money yet so my information could be wrong but it is what the chat representative told me. Although it is an old thread but I wanted to share it.

Hi, I just opened up an IB Canada account. I was about to deposit my funds but I read in this thread that if you deposit CAD to your account you have to borrow USD every time you trade and the exchange fees are very expensive. The only way to go about this is to deposit USD directly, which is doable but a bit bothersome (I would have to open an USD account). I thought I could fund in CAD and convert everything into USD at once within IB but can I not do so? What do you do? Do you keep CAD and put up with the high exchange rate or did you deposit USD directly? Possibly the information on the thread is not correct and you can just exchange everything from CAD to USD at once in the account? I have opened a ticket in my IB account asking this but this being the weekend and they don't seem to be known for great customer service, I decided to ask this here too. Also regardless of their answer(s), I would like to hear from you (users) directly what you do. Thank you.

If you mean Thor's Free Roll hot key, it's in the room drive of the chat room as "ThorsHotButtons.txt." You can see a folder icon on top of the chatroom next to the speaker icon and that's the room drive. Hope it helps!

Yes it is Justin! Thank you very much. One of the challenges I had is to place a stop order when thins are moving quickly and I don't want to move my eyes from the charts to Montage for (relatively) a long time. (I use Kyle's hotkeys now and it definitely is helping, but occasionally I want to just choose my share size. ) I'll try this out on Monday 🙂

Hi, I just looked into Kyle's hotkey. With Kyle's hotkey, you can double click the stop loss in the chart and then you can press the hotkey. Then it would calculate the share size with the risk$ you are willing to take and buy the shares in that size. It is awesome and I am going to use it. But at the same time I might want to buy a certain numbers of shares with the stop loss at a certain place (e.g. Buy 200 shares at $33.50 with the stop loss at $33.20). What I do now is I use Montage to manually place a stop order but if I could just double click the price in the chart like with Kyle's hotkey and press the hotkey for "buy 200 shares," it would be great too. Is there any way I can do so? I thought of tweaking Kyle's hotkey but as a layman for programing, I don't really know what to do.