Enough Wealth: Sold more stocks to avoid a margin call

Monday 2 March 2009

Sold more stocks to avoid a margin call

Today's 3% drop in the Australian stock market brought my Comsec margin loan account close to exceeding the 5% "buffer". If you get a margin call you have to sell shares (or deposit extra cash) to bring the account's margin utilisation back below 100%, not just within the 105% buffer zone. So I decided to sell off my CBA (Commonwealth Bank) and IFL (IOOF Investments) holdings.

About the only good thing about being forced to sell of stocks is that the continued bear market means that they are currently priced below the price I realised when I sold them off.

2 Mar 2009 Sell 1,300 IFL $ 2.730 NOW: $ 2.71
2 Mar 2009 Sell 130 CBA $28.780 NOW: $28.51
20 Feb 2009 Sell 4,685 APA $ 2.870 NOW: $ 2.58
20 Feb 2009 Sell 251 AGK $13.320 NOW: $13.29

1 comment:

Bigchrisb said...: Agree, margin calls are not a whole lot of fun... But there can be a bright site - I received a margin call and was forced to liquidate a substantial portion of my holdings in October. At that stage, I was forced to sell some of my ASX 200 index fund (STW) for about $38 a share. I've held on since then, and the etf has fallen below $30 a share - at which I've been slowly buying back in. Not pleasant though!; 5:40 pm, March 03, 2009