Quote from TM_Direct:
All an OPTION gives you is the RIGHT to purchase stock at a certain price before a certain time.....the reason it's regulated is because if it wasn't...1) firms wouldn't honor their obligation 2) you would be charged HUGE commissions and 3) you could be sold options on securities that don't exist.
I'm not saying that options shouldn't be regulated by the S.E.C. What I
am saying (pay close attention, and read this carefully several times if necessary) is that the S.E.C. should
not be telling me how often and in what timeframe I can trade options. They do this when they subject options to the
Day Trading Margin rule that was designed to govern brokers' lending habits to stock traders who trade on margin. The options I buy have no margin value, I do not use any margin to buy them, the broker is not lending me any margin. Yet the S.E.C. tells me I cannot sell one the same day I buy it more than 3 times within any 5 trading day period. Which is particularly heinous with options, because not only do they not use margin as just stated, but options are subject to constant
Time Decay, which means prohibiting me from selling an option on the same day I buy it can be lethal to my account. If I have to hold them overnight, they will generally lose value even if the underlying stock remains at the same price. And if the stock takes a turn the wrong way the next morning, I do not have the luxury of waiting for the stock to head back up to where it was, because that may be a week away or who knows, and by that time the option could have lost half its value or more just through time decay.
If they're going to subject the options themselves to PDT limitations, then they should include options value in calculating account value so a million dollar account doesn't have to be clamped with the PDT rules.
If they're going to insist that options value cannot count toward account value (because they aren't
securities, Series 7, etc. . .) then they should let me trade the damn non-marginy non-securitish options without their arbitrary restrictions.
As I said before: if they want to say the purchase price of options is deducted from my account's margin value, so that if the non-option portion of the account falls below $25,000 then my trading of
stocks will be subject to the daytrading restrictions, so be it. I would have to accept that purchasing options would have that effect on my ability to freely trade stocks.
But that in no way justifies extending those same daytrading restrictions to the options themselves, whose non-margined purchase put the rest of the account in that condition.
Thank you for your time and attention. I have tried to make this as clear as possible, I hope you will come to grasp my point.