Maybe the trick is to ask someone who *is* margined to the hilt! If my understanding is correct, the sum of all marginable securities in your account plus cash/money market balances minus margin debt is what figures in your margin maintenance calculations. You leave out all non-marginable securities from that calculation. If your maintenance is at 35% and you're almost there by virtue of other factors, downswings in non-marginable Softbank shouldn't tip that 35% over into a margin call. Consider the implications if it did -- ipso facto you have been using Softbank for margin borrowing. If that is true, either your broker goofed or your inital understanding that Softbank was not marginable was mistaken and it, in fact, is marginable. (Or became marginable after it appreciated a certain percentage?) Consider also my original example of options. Short-term options are not marginable, but to the extent that I own them and they have value they have to be reported. For purposes of margin maintenance, however, they might as well not exist. I can buy options out of margin debt if I want (maybe stupid if I did), but when computing my margin equity they leave them out because they are not marginable (could be worth precisely zero at the next moment). I'm guessing Softbank is not marginable in the States because it is a pink-sheeter, an internet pink-sheeter no less, with all the attendant implications in re liquidity and house risk.
That's my understanding of it all.... pick holes, throw stones....then again, maybe it's a firm-specific thing? My only substantial experience with margins is in the futures markets where it looms so large over all participants that it's necessarily quite cut-and-dried. |
