Gyroscopic Investing

I had been manually sweeping excess cash into the SWVXX or SNSXX money market fund at Schwab, but it's a mighty PITA if you find that you have enough cash + money market fund to buy an additional share of SPY, but now in order to make that trade, you have to wait overnight in order for the cash to be available from the MMF sale. Then you login, buy SPY, again push the excess cash to MMF, logoff. That's several min of your life you can't get back.

Then it hit me... IBTF is a T-Bill ETF with a fixed maturity date of December 2025. It costs $23.34 per share. After it matures, IBTG maturing in December 2026 can be used which is $22.83 per share. So you can soak up most of your spare cash by using IBTF alone, or SGOV + IBTF. Yes, up to $23-something could be stranded as cash because Schwab doesn't do fractional, but that's $0.87 per year lost interest, it's really not worth my time to grab that by trading these mutual funds.

In my mind, any Treasury security maturing within 12 months is cash. Technically it's not correct, but practically it is close enough for me.

Not an issue for margin accounts, however. But most of my trading is in my IRAs.

i have a limited margin account in my ira with fidelity

I tried limited margin in my IRA, but then they claimed out of the blue that I was a Pattern Day Trader. Wut? I must have fat-fingered a trade. So I told them to remove it and they did.

We switched out of Schwab because their core account pays almost zero.
People don't seem to talk about it much but the extra gyrations of getting interest bearing funds in and out of there are just not worth it.

snedgar wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2025 11:53 am We switched out of Schwab because their core account pays almost zero.
People don't seem to talk about it much but the extra gyrations of getting interest bearing funds in and out of there are just not worth it.

Oh, people talk about it on Reddit. I just decided to put up with a small amount of that gyrating for my IRAs, and any activity requiring immediate liquidation I conduct over at Fidelity. But as I might have stated in another thread, I don't like Fidelity's heavy-handed and seemingly arbitrary approach to security. I became concerned that my kids might be barred from helping me in my old age just when I need the help, as they aren't currently Fidelity customers, but they are at Schwab already.