Hello all. I'm trying to understand something and am having a hard time finding clear information online. Hopefully someone here can point me to some good info.
I'm mostly an invest-and-forget kind of investor, but do play with options a little just for fun (options buy would typically be less than 0.1% of my total investments). For my options "play" I have always used my Roth IRA with ETrade, which I've had for a couple of decades at least. In ETrade I could sell a position (stock or options) and immediately use that money to buy something else. I moved that account to Schwab (much more modern interface and some nice research tools), and found out I can't do that - I can't spend the proceeds of a sale until the sale settles. WTF? Is that really a common thing? I'm fairly certain I can sell/buy immediately in my Vanguard account too, but I don't trade actively enough to really say for sure - mostly mutual funds there, so I have to wait for the end of the day for the sale to happen anyway. I just never realized, I guess.
I saw something that says if I enable margin trading at Schwab, then I can buy immediately on margin and when the sale settles it will close that margin loan and there will be no interest (if it happens same-day). This was stated in a reddit comment by someone, but I can't find that info in any Schwab documents, so I'm not sure how much to trust it. I didn't set up margin on that account, because I don't want to actually borrow to invest, but maybe ETrade really worked through margin, and I just didn't know?
A little more backstory, and I'm hoping I didn't make a rash move: I was trying to simplify my overall investment situation, as right now I've got investments in various accounts over 5 different companies. I'm stuck with two of those (employer-driven), one of which is Fidelity, and my original thought was to move my Roth from ETrade to Fidelity. ETrade keeps getting moved/bought, and doesn't keep their interface very up-to-date so it just feels old and clunky (and sometimes just doesn't work, although that seems to have been improving lately). Plus, simplifying by having fewer companies would be good. Unfortunately, Fidelity customer service really pissed me off, and they were utterly incompetent - I tried for over 3 weeks to get that account moved - online didn't work, talking to customer service didn't work, they put in a tech support ticket, and that didn't work, they sent me paper forms but then I'd need to find a place to print and sign... it was a mess.
Schwab account was set up in less than 10 minutes, including the account transfer request, which settled in less than a week. Yay! No simplification for me, however (one company swapped out for another new one, albeit one with a nicer trading platform), and I probably didn't investigate carefully enough -- I set it up mostly because I was fed up with the incompetence of Fidelity customer service, which is a bad reason to make a decision. Vanguard would have been easy, but if I move retirement accounts there (possible) I'd have 99% of my assets with one company, which I'm trying to avoid. And their trading platform is terrible. Ugh. It shouldn't be this complicated....