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Money is held at Apex. I am one of those paranoid people who buys a Treasury in my name with my funds, then take a haircut off that to trade. So if they go under I get my Treasury back within probably a few weeks and send it to another broker or a bank.

And 100% of the statistics @David's faith posts up were made up on the spot by @David's faith. The real number averages in the upper 30s, although I guess thanks to Trump it hit a recent high of 44% in 2020 United States Government Spending To GDP | 1970-2020 Data | 2021-2023 Forecast...

Dash clearing with Apex. They have yet to make a margin mistake of any type, and more importantly when there's an issue I have a specific representative who was assigned to me who answers my call or returns my email within minutes to fix it. As a plus, he actually knows something about the...

You're saying you could sell $1M short with $1 in your account then. Which obviously isn't the case, you have to collateralize your short sale. Give it a try right now, try to sell more securities short in your account than you have cash and see if it creates a margin position.

Cuteness only exceeded by the armchair ISO experts:D

Always insightful background, thanks. Not sure if anyone else appreciates it since it's pretty inside baseball but I certainly do!

So you have to have at least $500k in your account if you want to sell short $1M in stock in a regular margin account. And if you have less than $1M in your account, anything between $500k and $1M is considered a margin loan. You can't take an account with $1 in it and sell $1M in stock short...

The end result is the same, but the logic is slightly different. You have an exposure of $2M and only $1M in your account. So you have to borrow an additional $1M on margin to cover that exposure.

You pledge collateral, often 10 year treasuries, to the repo market. So it's overnight borrowing against a much longer term security.

Note that penny stocks generally don't have options.

You don't even need another account. In my past experience before leaving IB I could just put in a limit order that was far enough away from market that it would never get hit and "The Algorithm" would index off that. Easier to do on a vertical spread which is what I mainly trade, but probably...

That's an interesting point.

You're right that most of them are significantly undercapitalized. Given my experience working with them I'm not sure it would necessarily be a bad thing if those who couldn't hedge at least a month ahead just weren't allowed to play. Interestingly it's sounding like some of the big boys got...

It continues to surprise me that the competitive power suppliers appear to hedge little or none of their supply. They either are in denial that there will ever be days that LMP prices go appreciably over average or they think they can pass it on to their customers, who in reality just won't pay...

I'll be interested to know if are able to make it work, thanks in advance for the updates. One caveat about the private letter ruling is that it technically only applies to the entity it was written to, but they are commonly used as a gauge for what the IRS' thinking is on a subject.

I agree with everything you said. That said, there is a way to set up an IRA to buy art and real estate, so I'm guessing there are some creative attorneys/accountants out there that have figured it out?

I haven't personally done it. I don't doubt it's hard to find someone who will allow it, although my read of an IRS private letter ruling on it is that it isn't legally prohibited (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/201434024.pdf). Like you I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has had any...

Funny, you did exactly as I predicted you would, googled for things that reinforced your bias. But you ran into a surprise when you did. You found out that your original assertion that electrical engineers all agreed renewable penetration over 25% caused grid instability because...Germany, was...

You're actually arguing that second hand cigarette smoke doesn't really cause cancer! I could go through and point out the facile nature of each of your points, again. But that pretty much says it all, so no need.

Nigel Calder, the lifetime climate change denier who in the 80's said that by 2030 "the much-advertised heating of the earth by the man-made carbon-dioxide 'greenhouse' [will fail] to occur; instead, there [will be] renewed concern about cooling and an impending ice age"? Sure. Literally...