KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, U.S. — The Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) said on Nov. 8 that on Nov. 15 it will reinstate customer initial to maintenance ratios to 1.25, following a temporary reduction to 1.00 that was announced on Nov. 7.

The intention of this reduction was to decrease the size of any margin calls resulting from the transfer of MF Global customers to new clearing members. The upcharge is normally implemented to customer accounts during a margin call.


Currently, the daily span files residing on theCME Group public directoryas well as theKCBT websitereflects the 1.0 ratio.

For clearing firms that wish to maintain the original value of the initial margin upcharge for speculative customer accounts, the KCBT Clearing Corporation is making available an additional version of the final SPAN risk parameter file.

This special version will yield margin requirements with the original initial margin to maintenance ratio levels. It can be distinguished from the normal file by an .im. in the file name. For example, today's end-of-day special file will be named kcb.im.20111109.s.pa2.zip.