I never have seen communique about that, what is the new PDT option rule? Does someone have more info about that?
ChrisM: As another poster, who wanted to contribute more than PDT-bashing, tried to say: please tell us exactly what happened. What orders did you enter, what happened, and when?
the sec is bought by the big wall st firms. where was the sec when the great wall st scams were going on? nowhere. they can't do anything about the morgan and merrill with their army of lawyers but they can mess with small day traders. thats easy. the big mm's just got po'd about traders getting in between their bid/ask spreads and went whining to the nasd,nyse and sec. plus if you are sec investigator,why would you want to screw with merrill when the goal in your career to join their lawyer ranks and make the big bucks.
why then mm's aren't got po'd about $25,000+ traders getting in between spreads but only about small guys?
When I incidentally broke the rule a month ago or so, they told me to wait few days or deposit more $. After few days account was OK, so I was trading for a month and never broke the PDT rule after that. On that day I just wanted to open new short positions in QQQ options to hedge existing long ones. I could do that on previous day so I did not expect any problems. Instead, got PDT message. Obviously I had lost some money, but thanks God, it was tester only so position was small. Now I would not never put a lot of money with IB. There were no apologies... total arrogance.
I got no insights, but SEC position does not look really clear to me. Another SEC BS example are splits in optionable stocks. It happened to me to get switched from ATM option to ITM just because of stock split few days before expiration. If you knew about that, here is beautiful way to make (i.e. to steal) a lot of money legally.
i guess they had to draw a line somewhere. i don't know how they came up with the 25k level. maybe the great arthur levitt figured this would eliminate a good % od daytraders since thats all he knew how to do was go after the smaller speculators. i would love to here anyones comments on this or any other info about the sec.
ChrisM, are you really personally involved in all of the business ventures that you ask for advice about? You sound more like an attorney seeking legal advice from non-lawyers for several clients on some very complex issues. If you are personally involved, you sound like an unrealistically busy guy with all of your international money management escapades. If you're living that way then it may be why an oversight has cost access to your accounts. If you don't slow down and manage some of the logistics then it might cost you more. It could cost you the Forex introducing broker business that you were starting in July. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20301 It could cost you the relationships with those that wanted you to manage their money earlier in July. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19713 It could also cost you the other LP or LLC that you sought advice on a while back. I know a guy that was trying to do business like this. It looked like he was making good money (he thought so too) for years. He was always spinning another deal with Canadian banks or Eurobonds and he was a lawyer doing some of the groundwork for his deals too. He's a lot more bitter now about the 18 months he did in the poky and a ban from securities than you are about the account suspension. You can get in way over your head if you try to do everything in this business and that can cause you to cross some lines you wouldn't even dream of in your right mind. Don't try to do business from what you learn on internet boards. Get a good lawyer and follow their advice. This stuff can get way too complex to manage on your own. Good luck.