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The sell off last August (2015) was painful. I did change (for better or worse) from naked put selling to delta neutral ratio spreads, and delta neutral calendar ratio spreads. (Long a far month and short 2 or more near months.). The BREXIT
did not affect me, but actually helped some.
Well, we have an ever extending negative list of brokers. I wonder if we could a few broker names to the positive list (which up to now only includes Decarley): Brokers with SPAN usage, no intraday margin calculations , no auto-liquidations ...
Thanks
p.s. Is Decarley different from Gain, Zaner riskwise?
I work with DeCarley and with RJO, and I am happy with both of them. DeCarley provides outstanding service, RJO provides more information on fundamentals (and charts) of commodities. Both have reasonable commissions (for medium to long term traders), but are more expensive than IAB.
In my opinion you can add RJO to the positive list.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,048 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,381
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There's two possible questions here.
The first is "how often are margins increased significantly and unexpectedly by the exchange?" and the second is "how often do brokers change their margin requirements above and beyond the exchange requirements".
The first happens all the time, and the more volatile the product, the more it will happen and the greater the magnitude of the change. Note this is decided by the exchange and will effect you no matter where you clear.
The second depends on what type of broker you use. There seem to be a lot of 'retail focused' brokers out there that seem to change their margin requirements regularly on little to no notice. On the other hand larger FCMs that clear larger accounts, and normally charge SPAN (aka exchange minimum) margins (initially incorrectly wrote commissions), rarely if ever charge anything other than SPAN margins.
What's weird is that some commodities have their margin changed by the exchange frequently. Others rarely.
ES margin was changed on 7/25/14. It wasn't changed again until 1/29/16. So it wasn't changed during the crash of Aug 2015. But it has been lowered 3 times this year.
So in other words it is extremely unpredictable.
Most times it hasn't bothered me. But when the market is having a huge move and then they raise margin during that it has caused major problems. Gold has done that several times.
