Portfolio Margin

As a FINRA broker dealer, Great Point Capital can give you the option to trade your own account with all the benefits of a professional trading firm.

Portfolio Margin Account

  • For traders who don’t need the extra leverage of a proprietary trader, or prefer the safety of an SIPC-insured account, customer accounts at GPC are the answer. You get access to professional trading platforms like Takion, experienced customer service that understands what active traders need, expanded availability to borrow stocks for short strategies, and access to all pools of liquidity.

  • Most options available for active traders outside of proprietary trading have a limited set of order types and pools of liquidity, along with slower data feeds. They are built for investing rather than trading, so they can bog down at times of intense market volume, which are precisely the times with the best trading opportunities. At Great Point Capital, the platform is the same whether you are a prop trader or a customer. Direct your orders to dark pools only, use new venues like IEX, or choose from a variety of order types that manage your order passively or aggressively.

  • It’s up to you how to route your order. Our experienced staff can walk you through all your options. Leverage in customer accounts is 4:1 intraday, and 2:1 overnight, as proscribed by Reg T. The minimum account balance for daytraders is $25,000. Below $25,000, regulations dictate that you can’t get the expanded leverage required for daytrading strategies.

Expanded Leverage with Portfolio Margin Accounts

Customers with balances over $500,000 can apply for Portfolio Margin accounts. By applying haircut methodology to your portfolio, leverage can be expanded to 6:1. Even greater leverage is available for Portfolio Margin accounts with balances over $5 million.

Great Point Capital recognizes the importance of leverage to take advantage of short-term opportunities. Portfolio Margin accounts allow you to make the most of your capital within your risk profile. It should also be noted that additional leverage can also lead to larger losses, so we can help you make use of Takion’s built-in array of loss limits and risk parameters to set reasonable parameters to your trading.

This can be particularly useful to traders who hedge their positions regularly. With standard customer accounts, the relationship between the positions is not considered. Each position is assigned its margin requirement, and the sum is limited to the 4:1 ratio. With Portfolio Margin accounts, risk-based haircut methods are used to calculate margin requirements. This means the account is viewed as a whole from a risk standpoint, so if you are carrying both long and short positions, those will partially offset each other when calculating your margin requirement.

For those with larger account balances, Portfolio Margin accounts can give you the luxury of expanded leverage without having to be registered with a prop firm or share profits.