Individuals new to active trading using margin accounts provided by their Broker/Dealer may soon discover their trading is frozen due to a violation of Pattern Dat Trader rule described below. In brief, if you plan to implement strategies or algos that make frequent trades in a margin account you're going to need to keep a balance of at least $25,000 in the account. You can test your algos in your paper account as long as you set the account balance to more than $25,000. We recommend setting the balance to $1,000,000 so you can feel like a player, and also have lots of room for testing multiple strategies.
This is what FINRA has to say about Pattern Day Trading:
Who Is a Pattern Day Trader?
According to FINRA rules, you’re considered a pattern day trader if you execute four or more "day trades" within five business days—provided that the number of day trades represents more than 6 percent of your total trades in the margin account for that same five business day period.
There are two methods of counting day trades. Please contact your brokerage firm for more details on how they count trades to determine if you’re a pattern day trader.
The rules also require your firm to designate you as a pattern day trader if it knows or has a reasonable basis to believe that you’ll engage in pattern day trading. For example, if the firm provided day-trading training to you before opening your account, it could designate you as a pattern day trader.
In general, once your account has been coded as a pattern day trader account, a firm will continue to regard you as a pattern day trader, even if you don’t day trade for a five-day period, because the firm will have a “reasonable belief” that you’re a pattern day trader based on your prior trading activities. If you change your trading strategy to cease your day trading activities, you can contact your firm to discuss the appropriate coding of your account.
What Are the Requirements for Pattern Day Traders?
First, pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades. This required minimum equity, which can be a combination of cash and eligible securities, must be in your account prior to engaging in any day-trading activities. If the account falls below the $25,000 requirement, the pattern day trader won’t be permitted to day trade until the account is restored to the $25,000 minimum equity level.
In addition, pattern day traders cannot trade in excess of their "day-trading buying power," which is generally up to four times the maintenance margin excess as of the close of business of the prior day. Maintenance margin excess is the amount by which the equity in the margin account exceeds the required margin.
What if I Get a Margin Call?
If a pattern day trader exceeds the day-trading buying power limitation, a firm will issue a day-trading margin call, after which the pattern day trader will then have, at most, five business days to deposit funds to meet the call. Until the margin call is met, the account will be restricted to a day-trading buying power of only two times maintenance margin excess based on the customer's daily total trading commitment. If the day-trading margin call is not met by the deadline, the account will be further restricted to trading only on a cash available basis for 90 days or until the call is met.
Any funds used to meet the day-trading minimum equity requirement or to meet a day-trading margin call must remain in the account for two business days following the close of business on any day when the deposit is required. The use of cross-guarantees to meet any day-trading margin requirements is prohibited.
Why Do I Have to Maintain Minimum Equity of $25,000?
Day trading can be extremely risky—both for the day trader and for the brokerage firm that clears the day trader’s transactions. Even if you end the day with no open positions, the trades you made while day trading most likely have not yet settled. The day trading margin requirements provide firms with a cushion to meet any deficiencies in your account resulting from day trading.
Most margin requirements are calculated based on a customer's securities positions at the end of the trading day. A customer who only day trades doesn’t have a security position at the end of the day upon which a margin calculation would otherwise result in a margin call. Nevertheless, the same customer has generated financial risk throughout the day. These rules address this risk by imposing a margin requirement for day trading calculated based on a trader’s largest open position during the day rather than on open positions at the end of the day.
Firms are free to impose a higher equity requirement than the minimum specified in the rules, and many of them do. These higher minimum requirements are often referred to as "house" requirements
Trading activity in the new Bitcoin ETFs fell rapidly yesterday. While several of the ETFs made it into the top 5 most heavily traded ETFs on Friday, interest on Tuesday, when trading resumed after the MLK holiday, the bloom was off the rose.
The long-awaited Bitcoin ETFs debuted in yesterday's trading, making quite a splash. Three Bitcoin ETFs were among the five most actively traded ETFs: GBTC, IBIT, and FBTC, all trading more than 10 million shares.
Day trading is a trading strategy where traders buy and sell securities within the same trading day taking advantage of short-term price fluctuations in various assets to make quick profits. Day traders aim to capitalize on small price movements by entering and exiting positions multiple times throughout the day.
Day traders employ a variety of strategies in the quest to make profitable trades. This is a list of the more common ones:
Quantitative trading, also known as algorithmic trading or algo trading, is a method of trading financial assets using advanced mathematical and statistical models. It involves the use of computer algorithms to execute trades based on predefined rules and strategies. This approach to trading has gained significant popularity in recent years, with many institutional investors and hedge funds adopting it as an integral part of their investment strategies.
Swing trading is a popular trading strategy that involves taking advantage of short-term price movements or "swings" within a larger trend. Swing traders aim to capture gains by entering and exiting positions over a period of days or weeks, rather than holding positions for months or years like long-term investors.
The main objective of algorithmic trading is to maximize profits by taking advantage of short-term market inefficiencies. It aims to exploit price discrepancies, liquidity imbalances, and other temporary market conditions that might arise within fractions of a second. By automating the trading process, algorithmic trading eliminates human emotions and biases, enabling faster and more efficient execution of trades.
This strategy creates a portfolio of QQQ (Invesco Trust Series 1) that is traded in correspondence with logic defined by the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) lagging indicator. The MACD strategy is a commonly employed algorithmic trading strategy, and can be calculated using Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs) by hand using the following formulas.
This strategy creates a portfolio of IWB (iShares Russell 1000 ETF) that is bought based on the recent news sentiments. The state of the news being reported has an incredible effect on the stock market, as popular reporting agencies can directly increase/decrease people’s optimism about the economy, leading to a snowball effect, of sorts.
Building custom ETFs using MachineTrader™ visual programming toolkit is easy to do and often an effective way to enhance your portfolio. While technically these aren’t algorithmic trading strategies, you can easily add flows that will optimize the ETF based on performance of the individual assets.
The latest significant change in the investment world is the rise of what we call, "independent trading platforms" (ITPs). These are software platforms whose user-friendly web and mobile applications provide all of the functionality of trading platforms, but pass the actual trade executions off, through an API, to the registered broker-dealer of the user's choice.
Monitoring minute-by-minute (or second-by-second) changes in time series charts of prices is a pretty tedious task. While a number of trading platforms offer off-the-shelf algorithms or bots for automating strategies, we've found that it's hard to make money using an algo that other traders are employing, or worse, other traders have programmed to work against.
You're a newbie to trading and you open your Robinhood account and begin to actively trade fractional shares of Tesla (TSLA). Your first dozen trades of the day work great as you pick the best moments to buy and sell. All of a sudden your account is flagged with a 'pattern day trader' warning.
