IB EU users buying power heads up

[peterB 291]

for the IB EU users, today i noticed that my BP is wrong. I did not realize it for 11 months what a bummer lol.

The thing is that IB EU shows your BP and Account balance in EUR currency and DAS does not accept the screenshot of your BP other than USD

What i did:  i converted all the EUR into USD so it shows on the portfolio page the balance in USD and EUR combined. Still i had to negotiate with DAS that the Buying power displayed is in EUR so i had to do a screenshot of the BP with Balance shown and fight with the support to use the formula BP USD= BP EUR/Balance EUR * Balance USD
just a note: the leverage is 1 to 6.66

so in my example a 10k EUR account i had BP 66000 EUR which was set in my DAS but in USD - it should have been 75364 instead due to the EUR/USD conversion rate.

so check your DAS BP

Edited November 19, 2021 by peterB

[peterB 291]

just an update

this gets reset every day according to DAS support. IB sends the equity but none of the sides deal with the currency sent. so if you are lucky to have account in some weak currency you actually might be lucky to have a great BP

today i opened a ticket with IB to deal with it, have no idea what can i expect now if DAS denied to deal with the communiction between DAS and IB

[peterB 291]

so the solution to this is on the IB account side. you need to convert your account to base currency to be USD. and yes i have tried others CZK and HUF are somehow bound to EUR so only converting to USD will make it right. other currencies will send the EUR balance only. maybe one day if EUR will be cheaper than a dollar we can use it for our advantage

the data is sent from IB to DAS at 4:00 AM so if you change it you need to wait for the next day to get fixed automatically yor call/chat with DAS for immediate fix based on your account screenshot from IB web page.

[JohnC 5]

Hi PeterB,

After fixing the BP issue, thanks. I now see that my cash balance changes due to the currency rate change between USD and my  initial currency i deposited in.  I see that on my cash report page of IB portal i still have the initial deposit in GBP but my BP has been changed for USD.  Is this something you also see? any idea how to resolve , or have i missed a step? or is this just the way it is . Thanks

[peterB 291]

if you convert the account to base currency USD it does not matter what cash you have

i have both EUR and USD and it counts the Total Cash in USD

[JohnC 5]

Yeah I have converted to base USD,  so  your EUR gets converted daily with the current USD/EUR exchange rate ?

[peterB 291]

actually it gets never converted

they sort of send the value in USD (based on the last rate they had) to DAS as your USD ballance and thats it

[JohnC 5]

It nevers gets converted but my balance changes daily based on the exchange rate between GBP/USD even if I didn't trade for a day or two. In fact because i trade small size even when i had a green day my balance didn't increase because the exchange rate went down.  I'll ask IB to see if there a way around this, maybe converting my GBP to USD, i thought when i changed my Base currency to USD this was what would have happened but seems not. thanks peterB for your input. 

[peterB 291]

i thought it was obvious

if you do not convert then u have the current to date value which obviously changes every day

you can convert with two clicks

the balance is synced one time daily as far as i know before market open

[JohnC 5]

it's always obvious when you know