posted
I just got a notice from Ameritrade that retirement accounts are not eligable for margin. Yet they had on the application for an IRA a box to check for margin. Are they just blowing me off to get rid of me? Anyone here have a retiremant account with margin. I had a margin account before on my regular account and it is kiliing me I cancelled it and now can't get one back.
PCola77
posted
You can't have margin for an IRA. My guess is that he form you saw had an option for regular or IRA, and so essentially the "Margin" box is only for regular accounts.
jgrecoconstr
posted
Thanks P for the answer. I guess I will just struggle along with the three day wait all the time.
PCola77
posted
I typed that from my blackberry, but at my computer now I can explain what I think is the logic for that rule. Think about it this way: Say you have $100,000 in your IRA and you bought $150,000 worth of BSC at $60 the week before the big crash. You basically borrowed $50,000. So now all of a sudden BSC goes down to $2, and you suddenly have $5,000 left in your IRA. You now have to pay back $45,000, but you can't put $45,000 into an IRA in a single year, so there's no real way to do it.
Make sense?
PCola77
posted
And to follow up, I wish they would let you trade on "margin" without actually "borrowing", i.e., trading under margin rules but ever having more than your own capital at risk. the problem with that though, is that you genuinely are borroing money when you buy before 3 days, because if it's one of those rare occassions where a trade doesn't settle, you'd be trading with money that isn't yours yet. So I can understand the rules in place, but it really does blow.
jgrecoconstr
posted
After doing this for awhile the three days really isn't that bad. It is just a pain when you get out of one and find another that same night that looks perfect and sure enough it goes up when you couldn't get in. If I can find one tonight buy it Tuesday and sell the same day I could be in line for another on friday. So sometimes you can actually get two trades in in a week. A monday buy /sell would be perfect for that but I have only had that happen once in the past two months.
posted