New way to avoid Pattern Day Trader PDT rules

PDT rule ruined me when it first came out, 15years ago, profitable full time day trader sub 25k to having to work again, sucks.

Interesting everyone over 25k used the 4:1 intraday margin and dropped sub 25k pretty quickly despite doing well on 2:1 for years before, and once sub 25k moved to high risk options and blew account me included :(

Tell me again how its to protect retail traders :(

Margin reduced to 30:1 soon i fear :(

If you were making good profits with less than 25k, your account would've surpassed the threshold quite quickly and PDT would have been irrelevant. Did you realistically expect to make a good living with a sub 25k account? That would imply 300%+ APR every year...
 
So you need someone on their ATS (of the "retail investor type") to happen to want to sell the same stock at the same time as you do? Maybe work for about the top 10 most liquid stocks, otherwise there's not going to be any liquidity.
There are several venues like this one for grownups, they do fairly well. Once you get the HFTs involved, there is plenty liquidity and if you have a trading venue, HFTs will come :D

http://intelligentcross.com/ by Imperative Execution does more or less exactly that for institutional traders. It's a dark pool with a single order type, Midpoint Peg (a cross at NBBO mid). The cross occurs within a randomized time interval (to prevent pinging and canaries) and there is some simple ML witchcraft added to address more complex order snooping. In either case, the idea is that once you have an open venue, you attract everyone who is willing to play by it's rules. Invariably, that includes higher frequency players among all others. Even if the setup is such that you can't pick people off, HF players like efficient execution for situations where they have no edge (e.g. hedging or position disposal).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
There are several venues like this one for grownups, they do fairly well. Once you get the HFTs involved, there is plenty liquidity and if you have a trading venue, HFTs will come :D

http://intelligentcross.com/ by Imperative Execution does more or less exactly that for institutional traders. It's a dark pool with a single order type, Midpoint Peg (a cross at NBBO mid). The cross occurs within a randomized time interval (to prevent pinging and canaries) and there is some simple ML witchcraft added to address more complex order snooping. In either case, the idea is that once you have an open venue, you attract everyone who is willing to play by it's rules. Invariably, that includes higher frequency players among all others. Even if the setup is such that you can't pick people off, HF players like efficient execution for situations where they have no edge (e.g. hedging or position disposal).
For sure. It would be tough to attract HFTs to sink the investment in to code for your dark pool when you have no volume and are specifically targeting very small transactions like these guys, but maybe the lack of sophistication of their targeted market segment is meant to make up for that. It also sounds like you can't access this dark pool except to have your money deposited with them, not sure if that applies to their MM as well but if so that makes it pretty tough to arb since you're alsways having to wire funds in and out and wait for wire settlement times, which has to be the most archaic part of our financial system.
 
If you were making good profits with less than 25k, your account would've surpassed the threshold quite quickly and PDT would have been irrelevant. Did you realistically expect to make a good living with a sub 25k account? That would imply 300%+ APR every year...

I was spending it was the issue, about a 12K account bringing in 3K to 4K each month, was making more than enough spending it on a hot blonde I was seeing, had about 2 weeks warning that the change was coming and was like, this has got to be a joke, but no :(

18hour days, with research and watching market live, wasn't easy!!
 
I was spending it was the issue, about a 12K account bringing in 3K to 4K each month, was making more than enough spending it on a hot blonde I was seeing, had about 2 weeks warning that the change was coming and was like, this has got to be a joke, but no :(

18hour days, with research and watching market live, wasn't easy!!

You couldn't have kept it up anyway. I still don't understand why people claiming huge consistent returns don't just borrow more -- turn that 3k per month into 30k per month, forget the PDT. I effectively borrowed on good terms when I had the opportunity.
 
You couldn't have kept it up anyway. I still don't understand why people claiming huge consistent returns don't just borrow more -- turn that 3k per month into 30k per month, forget the PDT. I effectively borrowed on good terms when I had the opportunity.

I started from 2K, 6months before and kept it up for 6months, so odds are I could of have kept it up, did very well but Options but spent a lot aswell having fun.

No opportunity to borrow, no opportunity to get back in that game, that's just too much money. back then that was a lot of money for me, less so 15years on mind.
 
I don't trade equities, so I'm not one hundred percent sure this is new information for equities traders, but I just thought I would share this to help out all the new traders out there who can't come up with $25k.

PDT rules only apply to margin accounts. If you have a cash account you can trade as much as you want ONLY if you do same-day settlement (T+0). The problem is that everybody does 2-day T+2 settlement.

Except, this place:

https://www.ustocktrade.com/

It looks like it's a dark pool for retail traders. Only limitation is that maximum trade size is $10k. But, there is no limit on number of trades. I think they do this to make the fee structure a very simple 1 dollar per 10k.


This is the quote from their FAQ:

As the first retail stock trading network, Ustocktrade operates as an ATS that allows users to directly trade with each other. A 10,000 share and $10,000 order value limit on each buy or sell order ensures that users in the network are the types of “retail investor” Ustocktrade is aimed at.

This limit is per order only, not for your total buy or sell order value per day.


At least there seems to be a charitable purpose to usstocktrade
 
If I remember correctly, ustocktrade labels stocks as "limited liquidity" whenever there isn't a buyer or seller lined up for a specific stock. If a stock is labeled as limited liquidity you can't market in or out of a position. I never seriously considered this an option because I couldn't stomach the thought of not being able to close a position with a market order.
 
Back
Top