I have opened a F & F account to which I want to add my current trading account. But when I try and link it I get the following errors: "the advisor is not allowed to have commodities clients" "the master is not registered to trade commodities". The F & F account has the same trading permissions as the personal account. Can anybody shed any light on what these errors actually mean?
Is the F&F account a cash account, or a margin account? My guess is that your current trading account is a margin account?
Correct, the current account is a margin account, I will have to check the f & f account. I presume they have to match? How do you draw that conclusion from the error messages?
Yes. Sometimes the word "commodities", in "IB lingo", refers to a margin account. I saw that word appearing in certain financial overviews of an account. The usage of this word depends on the context though.
If you account is carried by IB LLC it will contain both a "Securities" and a "Commodities" segment. This is necessary to adhere to the bifurcated regulatory structure that exists in the U.S. whereby securities are regulated by the SEC and commodities (e.g., futures contracts and options on futures contracts) by the CFTC (along with the separate customer protection and segregation rules which do not allow for transacting commodities transactions in a securities account and vice versa). Based upon the available information, it appears as if the client account has greater trading permissions than the advisor master you are attempting to link it to. Since the advisor is intended to maintain the discretionary trading authority over its client accounts, this inconsistency is not allowed. The simplest thing to do would be to have the advisor account request commodities trading permissions, assuming the advisor meets all the qualifications. Or, the client could request a downgrade in trading permissions to match that of the advisor. The latter path would obviously not allow the client to trade commodities any longer.
You should also note that there are instances where a client cannot link to an advisor master account because the advisor is not registered and that addition would violate the number of clients that the advisor can manage without having an NFA registration. Aside from that there is really not enough information here to determine why your linkage request was rejected. It does not have anything to do with margin permissions as that permission is only assigned at the client level where positions are maintained (there are no positions maintained at the master or "F" account level). If you wish to send a private message with your account ID, we can review and determine what needs to be done to link the account.