Life Journal

Buying on margin means that you are purchasing your stocks with borrowed money.

If you are buying stocks outright, you pay $5,000 for 100 shares of a stock that costs $50 a share. They are yours. You have paid for them free and clear.

But when you buy on margin, you are borrowing the money to purchase the stock. For instance, you don’t have $5,000 for those 100 shares. A brokerage firm could lend you equal to 50% of that in order to purchase the stock. All you need is $2,500 to buy the 100 shares of stock.

Most brokerage firms set a minimal amount of equity at $2,000. This means that you have to put in at least $2,000 for the purchase of stocks.

In return for the loan, you pay interest. The brokerage is making money on your loan. They will also hold your stock as the collateral against the loan. If you default, they will take the stock. They’ve very little risk in the deal.

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There are abundant of money in the stock market. However, not everybody can get the money out from there. Some people can gain a lot from the stock market but some has lost a lot of money there. It is very indecisive. Sometime at that moment, you loss money but after a few days, you may earn a profit and sometime is reverse. So, how should we do to get the money out from the stock market? Usually, there are two ways to get the money out from the stock market; that are investing and trading. The difference between trading and investing is trading involves buying and selling share, future or option within a short period of time; whereas investing is buying share, future or option and hold it for quite a long time, usually one year or more before selling it.

What is the difference between share, future and option? What we know is that option is much cheaper than the share and future, usually is tenfold lesser than the share price. So, if you have an amount of money that enough for you to buy 100 units share, you can use that amount of money to buy 1000 units option. And the return of investment is almost the same between share and option. Therefore, you will earn around tenfold if you buy option rather than share or future. However, the disadvantage is that if you lose on that trade, you will lose almost tenfold also. When we trade option, the amount of money that we can profit and lose is almost same as if we trade share. However, we need a lot of money to buy share compared to buy option. This causes the percentage of the profit and loss for buying option is much higher than share. The example is like when you buy $10 for one unit of share and $1 for one unit of option. When the share price drops for $0.10, the percent drop for buying share is 1% but for buying option, the percent loss is 10%. That’s why the percentage of the profit and loss for buying option is huge compared to buying share even though the share price fluctuates in a small amount.

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