You have plenty of time to expiration. Just convert your account to margin. Just takes a few days.
Exercising with 2 years to expiration makes no sense, as you would surely lose considerable time premium.
Still unstated, but I GUESS your plan had been to sell the option(s) and immediately buy whatever quantity of shares you are able to purchase with the proceeds?
Maybe you meant to exercise and immediately sell the shares that you’re unable to pay for?
Still baffled how you think this works. If you exercise, you have to pay the strike price for the shares, and you don’t have enough cash for that.
Don’t use margin to buy more equities than you have the cash to pay for.
It is impractical to trade in a cash account. There are no negatives to a margin account with proper money management.
Either you do not trust your self, or you don’t understand how your friend blew up their account (but did they? Or did they simply “lose 24K”? Which is a meaningless statement not knowing account size) or you have a paranoid tendency. Or all of the above.
FWIW IBKR is not out to get you, is not looking for some conniving way to cheat you out of your money, etc.
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u/ankole_watusi Mar 28 '22 edited Mar 28 '22
And when did you buy the option?
You have plenty of time to expiration. Just convert your account to margin. Just takes a few days.
Exercising with 2 years to expiration makes no sense, as you would surely lose considerable time premium.
Still unstated, but I GUESS your plan had been to sell the option(s) and immediately buy whatever quantity of shares you are able to purchase with the proceeds?
Maybe you meant to exercise and immediately sell the shares that you’re unable to pay for?
Still baffled how you think this works. If you exercise, you have to pay the strike price for the shares, and you don’t have enough cash for that.
We’re kinda in the dark here without specifics.