Quite a few of us here do. I believe he is now a proud father of a baby girl which may "soften" his uhmmm tone?
Actually, if you are net short premium then technically you are all in cash (if you include margin) and the premium that you receive is also cash so you actually have more cash than you started with.
I hope he is well. His tone provided almost as much value in entertainment as his posts did in education.
You can check Max Ansbacher's website. In one of his presentation, he mentioned something like that. His book, "The New Options Market" also mentioned this approach for surviving as a premium seller.
[edit] you can't manage your portfolio without any reserve. You want a "good" fund manager who knows when to get in the market, and when not to, not someone who just continue opening credit spreads with full capital involved. If you use all the capital for credit spread, one black swan will kill the whole fund.
It is the topic of optimal position sizing I mentioned. Optimal position sizing or optimal leveraging depends on your strategy and your trading style. This is an interesting topic for hedge fund management. You want to optimize your expected return, and in the same thing, your porfolio will have a x% confidence that it will not go below y%. You have to use your trading data to find out the optimal leveraging.
It's not that i dont want to use haircut margin, it sure can come in handy and i have been up to 100% in margin at times. Just last month i wish i had access to haircut margin. What i was probably saying is that 99% of the time i have no need for leverage and even reg-t is way over what i need. I dont sell cheap gamma and it's rare that my short gamma is unbounded so i have no need for haircut. If you pulled a random sample from my account a few times over the year, you will see i am usually at 100-110% cash(not buying power), with 85-95% in available margin.
This point is obvious .... the other part would depend on what you are trading and the r/r ratio. Carry on ....