Intraday and Initial/Maintenance Margins

Futures Trading Platforms Trading Plaforms | General Q&A
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Is there a place I can find the current margins for my account? I know I can look at the website, but margins change regularly with volatility and I’d like to know what my margins are at any given time.

In NinjaTrader, there is a “Risk” tab that contains all of this information – I found it pretty handy as a reference; without this, I would be forced to enter a limit order to see the impact on available margin and do the math.

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Hi @ggjunker,

In my opinion, the best place to check Initial/maintenance margins is the CME’s website. For example, here is the margin page for the E-mini S&P 500: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/sp/e-mini-sandp500.margins.html

The CME does not list the initial margin, however. Initial margin is 10% more maintenance margin. You can calculate this by taking 1.1 x maintenance margin. For example, at the time of writing this post the ES maintenance margin is $10,800.

10800 x 1.1 = 11,880

Meaning the initial margin of this product is $11,800. A trader must have $11,800 per position of the ES at the time of this response in order to hold these positions into the market close.

For intraday margins, we simply take a percentage of the exchange initial margin requirement. Day trading margins can vary from trader to trader based on risk managementa and due to the fact that we work with different FCMs, each FCM offering different margins.

To find out what your day trading margins are for your account, we suggest you email us directly at: support@optimusfutures.com.

We hope this helps!
Thanks,
Jake
Optimus Futures