Making the consolidation move

I called Questrade services yesterday and got things rolling for putting everything into the margin account. They have changed a few things since last time I had to call anyone about USD being held in accounts.

Apparently they have changed how USD is dealt with in margin accounts now. If I hold CDN$ it still works the same, I borrow against the CDN and am charged interest for this as it just uses the CDN balance as collateral. For me it is silly to do that only to incur a useless interest charge when I can just always use USD anyway.

So my TFSA balance is on it's way to the margin account. I started out also transferring the option positions as well but there was some hiccup in that transaction. I will have to just transfer those once they are in cash.

I realize that I will not be able to put any cash back into the TFSA until January and I may do that if I am still trading with Questrade. I anticipate moving over to Interactive Brokers and there are no TFSAs over there anyway and this lets me double my trading capital to boost my gains. I may have to pay taxes on the profits but those taxes are less than half of the more than doubling of my profit margin. I talked about that before and it would take some time for the TFSA to catchup with the margin trading based on the current limitations. Besides, I plan on trading stocks at some point and margin will likely be needed as well as being able to short stocks.

I am heading off camping for the next week so there will be no trading until the 12th, nor will there be any blogging until then either.

Jeff.