Like I said: it's too much work to manage all these different acct types.
I rather would prefer to have just 1 account type only, the standard CashAcct, to keep things as simple as possible.
Your post indicates that you do not understand the difference between the
type of account and the
account title.
An IRA and a 401(k) are retirement accounts in which a financial institution acts as a trustee or custodian, holding the funds for the beneficiary, i.e., the person who wants to set money aside for retirement. This is a specific
form of ownership, or a way of
titling the account.
An IRA or a 401(k) may be a cash account or a margin account.
Most US brokers offer many different ways to title an account. Other examples of account title include partnerships, corporations, limited liability companies, and joint accounts held by two or more people,
without forming a legal entity, such as an account held by a married couple, or by two brothers, etc.
All of these forms of ownership can have a cash account or a margin account.
So what's next? Your new broker-dealer firm will only offer one way to title the account? 'Cause you want to keep everything simple? So the only way to open an account at your firm is as an
individual? So I can't have a joint account with my adult son? I can't open an account for the corporation in which I am the majority shareholder and CEO?
If you don't offer accounts to business entities, then you are excluding a huge pool of potential customers. The extremely narrow restrictions you are talking about are arbitrary and silly.
What is your minimum for funding an account? $25K?
If you have that kind of minimum, then you'll get serious, experienced traders. But those kinds of traders will want sophisticated forms of ownership, and they will not be satisfied with just an individual account. If you don't offer retirement accounts and business accounts, those traders will not want to do business with you.
If you have a really low account minimum, like, say $3000 or $5000, then you're going to get a lot of low revenue, high maintenance accounts from people who have no f**king idea what they are doing. You'll get calls from people who don't understand the PDT rules, and people who don't understand the difference between equity and index options.
Is that the kind of client you want?
(BTW: PDT, in this context, does
not mean Pacific Daylight Saving Time. It means something else.)
B/c it's a CashAcct then the account owner can trade only what is avail in the acct; ie. it's his/her own task to fund it sufficiently for the next trade.