When you buy an option, it is not marginable and must be fully paid for. If you sell a naked option, it requires a margin amount of your equity. This is not borrowing. If you hedge the short call with long stock, that net trade can be done in either a cash or margin account and like I said before, does not require borrowing money unless the net long exceeds your equity.
Anybody heard of "Limited margin account"? It's said that "IRA can be either a cash account or a limited margin account that allows you to use more advanced features including same-day settlement. However, you cannot borrow funds or short sell." Question: can a Non-IRA normal CashAcct be turned into such a "Limited margin account"? Of course hoping to then have some more features over the CashAcct, not fewer
I can only speak for Lightspeed. We offer Limited Margin IRA accounts to those that would have qualified for a Day Trading Margin account and fund over $25,000 and use Lightspeed Trader. This is not offered to Individual or Joint accounts, only IRAs. Any account approved for 4X can request it be set for 2X. We do not have a 1X setting but you can request static bp to reduce what you can use.