Pardon? Even the most liberal brokers will be looking at $300/contract equity as a value to initiate "automatic liquidation" to protect both the stupid customer as well as the firm's capital account.
For me margin is the TOTAL FINANCIAL ENGAGEMENT from the trader, no matter how it is called. You can lose $1,500 per lot, no matter what the "margin" is, because that's the amount in your account and that's the amount the broker will take in case of a wipe out. You can also not "ramp up quickly" as you will need to fund not only the margin, but the account value will have to grow too. If not the broker will refuse trading more lots. So you leverage will be decreasing.
You can't read... my response to that post clearly stated "using your example numbers". And Im certain the nominal and notional value of margins etc were quite different in the 1970's versus today. hmmm... I mentioned that in my original post.
Your account size should be $1,500 per lot. That's the real margin. If you don't put up $1,500 you will not trade even 1 lot as the broker will refuse. So the total engagement per lot is what counts. Margin is the amount of money your broker wants as guarantee. In my example it is $1,500. So if you don't put up $1,500 per lot you are not going to trade. So your $1 or $100 "margin" is not realistic.
I understand, agree, and also operate with this viewpoint. But margin and account value are separate things.
well ok, usually initial margin is like 110%-130% or so of maintenance margin so in this case, if the maintenance margin is $1, then initial margin is prob. $1.10-$1.30 or to use the other set of figures, if initial margin is $1500 per contract (actually pretty close to TradeStation's day trading rate on the ES), then maintenance would likely be around $1350
That would be a couple of decimal points away from rational lot size given 100k equity. If you want to trade big, continue to build equity from earnings and increase size incrementally.