Problem with signal
Unable to STO 5 SPY1121Q128 - Current account buying power is ($131.50), cash is $7,745.50; equity=$10,525.00; currMarginUsed=$18,402.00; proposed trade would lower by $545.00(code=pre)
Please note this order should not not cost any margin. This also proves you have bugs in your code. I already bought 5 higher cost 132 strike SPY puts. I am buying a vertical put. The 5 I want to sell brings down the cost and risk of the put trade. Its basically free insurance where I would not make as much money on the trade since if SPY falls below 128, I don’t make money on that portion of the trade, but it reduces the cost I paid for the SPY 132 puts which went through.
I need you to manually push this trade through.
Thanks.
The issue is that your account currently has negative buying power. No trade can be made until you resolve that situation. Then in theory it should allow you to place the trade you want.
Again, it just allowed me to place a trade today to buy 5 SPY 132 puts. It does NOT cost margin to sell 5 SPY 128 puts. Its the same as doing a covered call. If I own a stock and sell a call for a higher strike, I get cash and don’t increase margin.
In regards to closing positions. I tried to close the open NEP option position to reduce margin, but it says the contract does not exist even though I was able to open the position.
Its hard to reduce margin, when I can’t close positions.
I clicked accept to your chat, but it seems not to work with firefox.
If you want to continue this in private, feel free to just e-mail me on my e-mail account you have on file.
I clicked refresh on my account, it said I had around $ 200 in buy power, so I am not at negative margin.
Hmm. I just closed your NEP option position without any issue. So either it was a transient problem at the quote feed or perhaps you mistyped the symbol? or perhaps you had "stock" selected instead of "option"? Not sure.
Anyhow, now that your account is no longer negative buy power, you should be able to place an opening trade. I am aware that selling the options you want to sell has no incremental margin use associated with it, but that is not what has been happening here. Rather, you are not allowed to open a new position when your account has a negative balance, as your did (just barely, by like $50 bucks, I think).
Please try again and let me know.
Matthew
I have seen this kind of thing before. Basically Mr E C Technology wanted to enter an option spread for which there probably was enough margin, and had that gone through as a spread then his system would never have entered a negative buy power state in the first place.
Since C2 does not support option spread orders, he had to enter two independent legs instead. C2 allowed him to enter the first leg which resulted in negative buy power (incidentally, it would have been better if that order had been rejected, or at least a warning produced requesting final confirmation) but then did not allow the second leg which, in a real broker account, would have brought the buy power back up to positive.
Once I learned about this "quirk" I changed the way I enter orders to reduce the chance of getting into this situation again.
Dean.
