Personal trading story alert.
Bleah. So Schwab has raised the margin requirement on Tesla to 75%, which substantially increased the margin requirements for my short puts -- beyond what is covered by margin capacity on the one other stock where I trust them not to raise the margin requirement. (And Schwab made another stock, the merger arb I'm waiting on, totally non-marginable simultaneously.) Out of caution, I decided to prepare myself for the (unlikely, but potentially disastrous) possibility of Schwab making Tesla non-marginable entirely, so I converted all my short puts into put spreads by buying deep-deep-in-the-money puts, thus substantially reducing the margin capacity required to carry (even in the case where TSLA becomes non-marginable) down to below what's covered by the one stock I trust to remain marginable (even if it drops by 10%). Unfortunately to cover the purchase of these insurance puts which will become worthless, I had to sell a little bit of my TSLA, about 3.6% of my position. :-( I tax-loss-harvested, which is some consolation. But it's better to be insured against a margin call, even if it was an expensive insurance; I don't want to risk being forced out of my positions. I wanted to maintain the short put positions (all LEAPS) because they will almost certainly still make a lot more profit than the insurance puts cost. If the merger arb cashes out I should be able to sell the insurance puts back and recover some of the cost; if TSLA is still down I may be able to restore my position, but I doubt I'll get that lucky.
BTW, when you see those large spikes in open interest in never-gonna-pay-off $50 and $100 puts? Those are probably held long by bulls who have sold puts at higher strikes, in order to defray their margin requirements by converting their positions into spreads.
