News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering. Parent comment

Re:Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering by chrisaycock on Saturday January 22, 2011 @03:32PM (#2131009)
> max out your real cash to accumulate positions (do not go on margin)

Options can't be bought on margin. They lose value over time and thus can't be used as any form of collateral.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering by dedward on Sunday January 23, 2011 @09:53AM (#2132461)
Cool if true - the one thing you want to make sure of when using the IB interface is that you don't accidentally end up on margin - which is easy fairly easy to do by accident.

(It's not that they try to get you there - it's just a trading platform for pros. A friend once told me how part if portfolio was sold automatically because of an automatic margin call when he didn't even realize hew as on margin)

[ Parent | on HN ]