Ironfist Yes to both questions. What ever it goes up you keep minus margin fees and whatever it goes down once you cover your position you will have your balance minus the amount you lost on your trade therefore giving you less capital to trade with now so if you have 30 at 4:1 now you will only have 29 at 4:1 assuming you lost only 1000 in the trade. And to answer your last question you get margin on equity not just on cash so if you bought $24k worth of a stock and only have $1k left in cash as your example you still get 4:1 margin on the whole $25k (of course as your position gains or loses value so will your margin)
This topic I found interesting. thanks for starting it and you did get some serious replies... I also started a topic as I needed advice to give my elderly aunt and I was getting some serious replies and then suddenly someone attacked both me and my aunt....I have only made a couple of posts here due to I read mostly as I am not very experienced but I am shocked by the hatred of that member here and even more shocked that nothing was done about his posts or even his posting ability. Makes me wonder about what this place really is to be perfectly honest. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=73259&perpage=6&pagenumber=1
Its a board for entertainment and some serious topics. It gets a bit rough at times but the quality of the good information here exceeds that of the more civilized boards If the person you were talking about was Drawdown, you might want to look at his earlier posts when he was banned under the name Coinz. He comes pretty close to insane in that persona. It is possible to get banned
Part of me wants to applaud the fact that some mods have a sense of humor, but another wants me to say that it didn't have any effect in improving ET whatsoever and somewhat lowers the standard. We all know mod's have lives as well, maybe one sentence or two for a joke, but to write a whole paragraph, just makes someone look like a bad apple. Just my thoughts, I don't really care about anything else in this thread, but I would like to mention to the OP, that putting 2k at a firm and day-trading, vs. your 30k on the line doing retail, well, if you are smart, you'll figure out which could be the better option for a new trader.
If I trade $2k at a prop firm i'd be out a max of $2k. My plan with trading $30k of my own would have me out a max of $5k. I know that's a bit more, but still.
I know. I've been on message boards for a long time and I know there's always some people like that. Besides, he PMed me and told me that I could borrow against his credit cards to fund my account. See? He's a nice guy