Exchange Margin Is Not Broker Margin.

A clearing house sets the performance bond its members must post. A carrying broker sets what its own customers are held to, at or above that figure, and can raise it at any time. Those are different numbers, set by different institutions, for different reasons. A table that reports one as the other is not useful, because the figure a reader needs depends entirely on which of them they were asking about.

Golden Capital Partners keeps them apart. The exchange layer carries the venue, the clearing house and the published requirement. The broker layer carries TradeStation's overnight and intraday requirements. Each figure keeps the source it came from and the time it was read, and a broker's figure never appears under an exchange heading.

TradeStation publishes a futures margin table by product. Ten columns, each answering a different question.

• Product Description and Symbol Root identify the contract.
• Long Overnight Margin and Short Overnight Margin are what it takes to carry a position through the close. They are not always equal: a short position in a contract with asymmetric risk can require more than a long one in the same contract.
• Long Maintenance Margin and Short Maintenance Margin are the levels the account must stay above once the position is on. Falling below produces a margin call.
• Intraday Initial and Intraday Maintenance apply to a position opened and closed inside the same session.
• Intraday Rate is the multiplier that produces the intraday figures from the overnight ones.
• Currency states what the requirement is denominated in.

Two statements sit on the page rather than in the table and matter as much as the numbers: a margin call must be met the same day the account incurs it, and requirements are subject to change or revision at any time without prior notice.

The intraday rate is a multiplier applied to the overnight requirement. A rate of 0.10 means an intraday position requires a tenth of the overnight figure. A rate of 1.00 means there is no intraday reduction at all, and most of the products on the table carry exactly that.

It is not always a reduction. The published table has carried rates above 1.00, where holding a position intraday requires a multiple of the overnight figure rather than a fraction of it. Any model that assumes day margin is a fixed fraction of the overnight requirement — half of it, a tenth of it — is wrong at both ends of that range and wrong on the majority of products between them.

Where the reduction exists it is conditional. It applies to a position opened and closed within the session. A position still open at the close is held to the overnight requirement, and the account has to be able to meet it at that moment, not in the morning.

Where a verified broker figure exists it is shown as the broker's figure, with its source and its age. Where none exists, an estimate is shown as an estimate, labeled with the assumption it rests on, and it is replaced the moment a real figure is available. A manufactured number presented as a requirement is worse than no number at all, because a number gets acted on.

Nothing shown here or in the terminal is a quotation of the requirement a particular account will be held to. The requirement is whatever the carrying broker applies to that account at that moment, and only the broker can state it.

The Margin Terminal holds the requirement layers for the contracts the firm follows: the venue and clearing house, the exchange requirement, the broker's overnight and intraday requirements, the source of each and how old the reading is. Where a layer is missing it says why, rather than leaving a blank cell for a reader to fill in with an assumption.

It also does the arithmetic a requirement implies — what a position ties up, what remains, what a move is worth — on inputs supplied in the browser. Those inputs stay in the browser.

A broker's table is broker-wide. The exchange layer is per venue. CME Group contracts clear at CME Clearing, ICE Futures U.S. contracts at ICE Clear U.S., ICE Futures Europe contracts at ICE Clear Europe, and Cboe Futures Exchange contracts through the Options Clearing Corporation. Each publishes its own requirements, on its own schedule, in its own format.

TradeStation's figures sit on top of those, not instead of them. The broker table tells you what the account is held to. The venue tells you what moved underneath it, and why a requirement changed.

Margin is the collateral a position requires. It is not a measure of what that position can lose. Futures are leveraged, and a futures position can lose more than the amount deposited to hold it. A lower intraday requirement does not make a position smaller, safer or easier to exit; it makes the same position cheaper to carry for part of one day.

Futures and options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for everyone. Only risk capital should be considered. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

TradeStation's margin page is the broker's own statement of its requirements, and each clearing house publishes its own. Both are linked below.

Where this site states a requirement it names the record the figure came from and when that record was read, so the statement can be checked rather than trusted. A requirement repeated second-hand, without its source and its date, is not a requirement. It is a rumor with a decimal point.