Quote from Landis82:
I'm sorry, but 4:1 intra-day margin has NOTHING to do with buying or selling an amount of stock equal to your account value, 4 times per day.
sorry i didnt make it clear.
tdameritrade doesn't update margin on a real time basis. you only have a certain amount of buying power per day, and if you use it up, you cannot make any more daytrades. with IB, theoretically, you can make infinite number of daytrades as long as you are not over the 4:1 margin anytime during the day.
Say Acct value is 100K. Td, you have 400K intraday buying power. You buy stock 100K, sell stock 100K. Repeat 4X. You cannot make anymore daytrades.
IB, you can.
