Now factor in that 50k-100k is the median yearly wage in Switzerland - and that’s before having paid taxes and your cost of living. Most people, or in fact the average person in Switzerland, will just be unable to cover that margin loan with earned cash.
You’re also one of those highly paid IT / developer kind of guys, you say?
How much can you come up with when being unemployed?
I mean, When shit hits the fan in the stock market, there’s a non-zero risk of becoming unemployed for quite a few people.
For S&P500, we’ve had a 33%+ drawdown in one month or so in 2020 (COVID).
To the bottom.
Looking at shorter timeframes, S&P 500 had an 48% drawdown within only 6 months or so in 2008.
average people would not have 1 million in stock on IBKR while relatively young to think about 25% margin to further accelerate FIRE.
Additionally you usually can count on some other income - like your wife or partner, and so if shits hits the fan everyone is buckling and going into saving mode.
So I’m not sure why you are bringing the average salary for a discussion on 25% margin - while ignoring that the point I wanted to make, is to reduce margin to the amount you can safely repay within one year, not as percentage of wealth:
I’m not sure where you are going with the post - would you disagree with my conclusion above? I totally agree that its risky and that’s why I thought of a “safer” setup based on how much you can save.
This is always a point in the USA but if you have unemployment benefit like many in CH, this is kind of moot. Yes you get 20% less, but you are still able to scrape something together, less costs (commuting etc). In any case a further point to not focus on “safe percentage” but in “safe repayment in one year”.
The portfolio margin account requires an asset value above 100’000 $.
Below that, you can get a Reg. T margin account. It generally affords less leverage than the portfolio margin account, but it is probably ok for 20% margin.
Reg T is worse in that it is rule based with automatic position liquidation once certain numbers are reached whereas portfolio margin has a risk-based model with more tolerance especially if you have diversified ETFs.
If your margin money stays under the 25% portfolio value you should be pretty safe with VT/VWRL/ACWI or similar. If you want to be really safe go for 15%-20%. This is not investing advice.
Never got margin called but maybe with portfolio margin you also get some time to inject money?
Let’s say you have 100k invested in VWRL and take a loan of 20%.
What happens to the margin loan as you fund monthly the account with cash? Is that cash counted towards “repaying” the loan or does it not work like that?
I am trying to think about how it would work during the accumulation phase for an investor from the operational point of view.
This was discussed above. Just read the thread. But in short, you get negative cash balance. You can then transfer money and when you convert it to the negative currency, the balance of the loan is smaller. You can buy again and the negative balance increases again. It’s very simple it goes negative.
Will also convert to Portfolio Margin, was not entirely clear to me before.
How high could you theoretically go with the margin? Assumed you have a Portfolio Margin Account with some 150k in assets / cash? Also to max 50% of the 150k?
I now upgraded to Portfolio Margin, and the buying power is really the X-fold of the current account balance.
However, it is almost impossible to calculate minimal margin requirements due the complex calculations IB makes.
What I did not find:
Are the portfolio margin requirements always lower / at least minimally the same as they are for a Margin Account? I would assume so, no? Just as a reference.
How fast is fast? If I get a few tens of Ks of CHF (or EUR or USD), can I then straight away wire them to my back account, or do I need to wait a couple days until the cash is “settled”?
With a margin account - yes. You should get cash in your bank account next day. Did it recently with EUR. With CHF it could be the same day if you request a withdrawal in the morning.
When I try to withdraw (CHF as an example), it shows me the amount of settled cash that I can get without margin, and the amount I could get using margin, which is about 60% of my securities’ current total value.
I see that different ETFs have different margin requirements. If I do get a margin loan, against which security will it be granted?
Do you think that the yield of the margin loans will remain lower than the mortgages? The benefit of the mortgages is that it’s clearly regulated. Not sure if that is the case also for the margin loans? Has somebody actually tried a big margin loan over a longer period?
Against the whole portfolio, if you want to put it this way. If you are on RegT margin, you are fine as long as your net equity (stocks value + negative cash balance + eventually positive cash balance in another currency) is higher than 50% of your stocks value. I always think that borrowing up to 25% of your current portfolio value is fine: as long as your stock positions don’t fall by more than 50%, your margin requirements are fulfilled.
Margin interest rates seem to be slightly higher than mortgage interest rates, even at IBKR. For the first CHF 90k, margin interest is reference rate + 1.5%, for 90k-900k it’s +1.0%, for >900k it’s +0.75%. SARON mortgages are available for reference rate + 0.6%-0.8%, as far as I know.
I don’t expect these rate premiums to change often.
For some reason, IBKR’s reference rate is currently -0.33%, though, despite SARON being at -0.20% and IBKR claiming their CHF reference rate to be SARON.
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