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Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
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I probably should have clarified, all 3 times was due to new positions with new margin requirements, and not because of large losses on existing positions.
Why give the broker so much interest free money? I'm sure they use it as float for their own purposes.
Maybe if some % of balance can be automatically held in a money market fund, but otherwise it seems to me to just be unnecessary counter party risk for 0 return. Talk about a bad risk reward trade off.
When I scalped stocks, I used all my leverage. I got a couple of margin calls that way but I don't hold anything for more than a few minutes. The calls went away. A long time ago when I didn't know how margin calls (or trading ) work, I got a few calls when I held things overnight. I never had a situation where I was liquidated.
Now I trade ES mostly and can only trade the number of contracts that reflect my account balance. At least that's how Ameritrade ThinkorSwim works.
I got lucky and built my account to 700k from 84k despite 2 margin calls that I appreciated out of. Once I learned that I was stuck on a day 2 margin call, I decided to take profits on all day 1 margin calls. That works much better and helps me escape over leveraging.
But, after Monday night when I very easily could've lost all of it by a forced close out (luckily, the market swung back before I got below 100k and I ended up in the positive at the end of the day), I started avoiding this. The good news is that I'm often on the right side of the trade, but it could take 1-2 days for the trade to turn around. I'm 77% since I started in May. But, since I could take a few hits with mark-to-market, I'll lever up for the day, but will close out half of the position before settlement if I'm expecting a rally in my favor to continue. I usually make the best money on shorts though.
So now I need to change my answer. Since one of the accounts I trade is pretty small, right now I am using close to 90% of my margin on one of my accounts. It is still outside my comfort zone, but I am just taking advantage of a few opportunities I saw over the weekend.
Probably depends on the size of your positions. Force closing a few contracts is almost no risk to the broker, and they get a nice fee for it. Force closing 100+ contracts in a very volatile market is more risky to the broker, and the flat liquidation fee may not be enough to offset their risk. In this case they may not want your repeat business if the risk is large enough.
For 1 contract traders, I think they like margin calls.
I have a well known trader friend, and his approach was to use all margin, every day. At end of day, if he had a margin call, the broker would call, and my friend would exit his biggest losers. Sort of a forced way to maintain a "cut your losses" discipline.
I guess the broker was OK with it, probably because this guy generated a LOT of commissions...