PuppBaby wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:01 pm
Haha wow that's wild I cant mess with Margin I'm a firm believer in not owing someone else any many,
Actually, for the longest time, I held this same belief. Never had a mortgage (means Death Contract in French, from what I understand).
Started investing in 2004 on the side - had a busy full-time gig so I was just mostly subscribing to various financial newsletters and doing exactly what they told me to do with my money.
Learned that this wasn't exactly a formula for success, lol. Still, accumulated a lot of experience, which mostly boiled down to: nobody really knows anything, lmao. Certainly not the future. But a lot of people are really good at drawing beautiful lines on a chart to suggest they know what is going to happen in the markets ...
Never touched margin until earlier this year - inspired, ironically, by Sol's writings on this subject. Also spoke to some investing friends who gave me some "safe" guidelines to follow when using margin for the 1st time - like, use only 20% to 30% of your limit, try to never use more than 50%, etc. - basically, don't be an idiot.
Of course, I tend to not like rules and quickly maximized my margin use - mostly to see what it felt like - and subsequently got politely margin-called a few times, for small amounts. I've got enough collateral so that if push came to shove, I can sell enough assets to cover all my margin use on any given day, even at max. margin, so I think I'll be okay. Also have reduced my margin use somewhat.
So my original experiment was to see if I could generate enough net option premium through spinning the Wheel to cover my margin interest costs. Thus far, Wheeling has done that, and much more, so it's nice.
The basic idea is to erode away my remaining margin Wheeling and letting a portion of my stocks get called away at a profit.
The way I explained it to someone was that in a sense, the margin use is like a mortgage - and all my stocks in aggregate is like a house - and I'm slowly paying off the mortgage through spinning the Wheel.
Real interest rates are in the neighborhood of 5.74% or so, at least (CPLie - 10yr yield), prolly a lot higher - 12-13% or so? - in terms of annual loss of purchasing power of cash.
The margin interest rate is currently 5.25% for me for USD, prolly will go up again. So in a sense you're "getting" a +7% return by using margin at these rates, theoretically, vs. cash.
Governments like inflation as a stealth tax to erode away government debt over time.
In a similar vein, for the retail investor, margin, when used correctly ---> the theory is that if real interest rates (i.e. loss of purchasing power) are greater than the interest on your loan/margin/mortgage, it makes sense to borrow, assuming you have the collateral to pay it back in the event of a Dark Swan landing on your shoulders.
Nfa.
