Restrictions on stock trading in IRA accounts

General
1

All,

I have a newbie question: what restrictions do I have on buying and selling of stocks when using an IRA?  I am thinking of the settlement requirements and how that impacts following a trading system that rebalances once a week.  If all trades are to execute on a Monday, how will the requirements of settled funds impact the buying of stocks on the same day? If I am trading $10,000 worth of stocks, will I be required to have $10,000 additional cash in order to buy the new stocks to replace the ones I sell but have not settled?

Comments?

Edited: And why is a stupid scroll bar appearing for my message?
2

You must have pasted the message from some word processor. You have a Tab as the first character which Discourse treats it as a special style. Just edit the post and delete the Tab.

3

The stupid scroll bar is added because I indented the text in each paragraph using 4 spaces. If I use 0, 1, or 2 spaces, it does not appear.

Now, back to my original question: how to I place trades in an IRA account when my buying and selling occur on the same day without encountering the settlement requirement?

4

Many brokers, including Interactive Brokers and Fidelity, allow you to trade the same day in an IRA without the trades being settled. So you can sell in the morning and buy in the afternoon.

5

Only issue I’m aware of is if you sell position A and use those funds to buy position B on the same day using unsettled funds, then you can’t sell position B until those funds would have cleared or you’ll break a free rider rule. I’m not sure on the specifics, but I’ve screwed this up before and it results in limits on your account being unable to trade on unsettled funds. Not sure if I made the mistake in an IRA or regular cash account, but my activity was restricted for a while. I think I was trading around earnings and traded too quickly. I think (again, not sure, just recalling things vaguely) you may be able to avoid the free rider rule by enabling an ira margin account. It’s not margin as I understand it, but seems to allow sidestepping the unsettled funds issue.

edit: Within past 2 weeks I’m pretty sure I’ve traded (sold and then bought with resulting cash) same day on unsettled funds with IB, Fidelity, Schwab and Wells Fargo.