Let's say I have 10k USD in my margin account. I place 100 round trip orders in a single day, each worth 2000 USD (999 USD buy order and 1001 USD sell order).
How much margin did I use at the end of the day? Can I do as many 2000 USD round-trips a day as I like?
I am trying to understand how I can do frequent day trading without running into an issue with unsettled funds. I am interested in an answer both relating to stock and forex trading, and any other instrument that settles instantly or otherwise allows me to trade 100s of round-trips each day.

Does someone has the exact formula that allow you to calculate your "Tradable balance" on BitFinex based on your collateral in Margin Wallet, open positions and open orders ?
​

Initial equity is 30%. This means the USD value of the funds you hold in your Margin wallets need to be at least 30% of the USD value of the position you wish to open.
So if you have 1000 USD in your margin wallet. Those 1000 USD will serve as collateral for opening margin positions up to 3.33:1. IE a margin position with a USD value up to 3333.33 USD.
If you wish to use 2x leverage only, the size of your position should only be worth 2000 USD.
When holding 1000 USD your tradable balance will be 1000 * (1 / 0.3) = 3333.33 USD

​
This is the only info I found in the documentation. But this doesn't take into account open Margin positions and open Margin Orders.

Sorry in advance for asking what might be a trivial question and one that is only applicable to a small group, but I've never used my margin power and I'm curious if I can get an answer before the weekend is over.
Question: How does E-Trade calculate margin if I run a spread / strategy where my maximum risk is greater than my cash on hand, but less than my margin power?
For example: I have $5,000 worth of stock in my account and $0 cash, but also $10,000 of margin buying power. If I open a bear call spread with an immediate credit of, say, $4000, but carry a maximum risk of, say, $6,000, does E-Trade reserve $6,000 of margin for my maximum loss? If so, does that cost me anything?
Just thinking logically I'd assume they flat out don't let you take risk greater than your cash+margin balance, but when do they charge interest on use of margin? Is it when you put the money at risk, or when you actually spend it?

Lesson one is "stock basics" summarized: (2 videos) for every buyer there's a seller, for every seller there's a buyer, fear and greed drives prices, what fundamental analysis means, what technical analysis means.
lesson 2 is ETFs summarized: (video 1) Bull markets are opportunities, bear markets are bigger opportunity's, Bear markets never last, always followed by bull market. (video 2) The market is volatile in the short term in the long term it always goes up, what an ETF is, different types of ETF indexes. (video 3) Expands on the different types of ETFs (bonds, commodities etc). (video 3) A 35min video on dollar cost averaging lol. (Video 5) summarizing the last 4 videos.
Lesson 3 is Steps to investing summarized: (video 1) A good business increases value over time, a valuable business has higher sales, earnings and cashflow. (video 2) invest in businesses that are undervalued or fairly valued, stocks trade below its value because investors have negative perception of the company
lesson 4 Financials summarized (all 4 videos) where to find financials, how to use a website (Morning Star) to screen stocks, how good is the company at making money, Look for companies that have growing revenue, check growth profit margin and net profit margin of company compared to industry.
Lesson 5 Stock Valuation summarized (2 videos) go here: https://tradebrains.in/dcf-calculato and look at what the calculator is asking for, go to Morning Star find the needed numbers that are required, bam you got the intrinsic vale.
Lesson 6 Technical Analysis summarized: (all 4 videos) What are candles sticks, what do they mean, support and ceilings, consolidation levels.
Lesson 7 The 7 step formula summarized: (3 videos) See what I wrote in lesson 3 and lesson 5.
lesson 8 Winning portfolio summarized summarized: (video 1) Diversify, keep portfolio balanced, different sectors (video 2) More sectors, Dividends (video 3) More on sectors, more on dividends, what are different stock caps (large cap, small cap etc)
Lesson 9 finding opportunities summarized: (video 1) see lesson 3, (video 2) creating a watch list,monitor news, company announcements, stock price, financials
Lesson 10 psychology of success summarized: (2 videos) basically: common sense.
Lesson 11 Finding a broker summarized: (1 video) look at fees and commissions, see minimum deposit, check margin rates, make sure it has a good trading platform.
I just saved you 18 hours and $1000.

What is yield farming? Most broadly, it means getting some benefit for providing capital, usually in the form of tokens. Currently, there are three major different schemes:

1. Staked funds aren't utilized in any way and tokens are distributed proportionally to what's staked (may be dai, weth, ycrv, or other tokens). Token price risk: zero. Token accrues, but even if it falls to zero you lose nothing. Smart contract/protocol risk: depends on the staking contract, usually low to zero. Contracts are usually simple modification of the first contract used by yearn (taken from synthetix), making analysis easy by only looking for differences. APR: may start high, but usually collapses fast to relatively low values as funds pour in.
   
2. Providing liquidity in trading pools. Tokens are gained in return for providing liquidity for requested tokens on uniswap, balancer, curve, mooniswap. Token price risk: medium to high, depends on pool weights. See these two articles for details on how liquidity providing works: Uniswap - pool weight is always 50%/50% Balancer - arbitrary pool weights, down to 2% for one token. Can be multitoken, not just two. Smart contract security risk: medium to high. In addition to checking the (usually simple) staking contract, requires security analysis of the token contract. If it's possible to mint a very large amount of token, or someone has a hidden enormous stash, the attacker could clean the pool by dumping them at once. I'm aware of one scam called "YYFI" that did this - you can see the attacker successively getting DAI from the balancer pool. Fortunately for the victims, he wasn't very competent and did everything manually, giving time for people to withdraw. A more competent attacker would automate the pool cleaning process in a smart contract. APR: usually very high - upper three digits or four. It's rarely realized APR because it's calculated assuming that token price stays constant. If you think the token being distributed is undervalued definitely the best option to farm.
   
3. Depositing and borrowing funds for defi. Currently utilized by compound and cream (a compound clone). Users get rewarded with tokens for lending and borrowing tokens. Token price risk: zero. Security risk: the most complex to analyze option of all, although Compound itself is definitely the safest defi dapp on ethereum.
   

Warning: gas fees are high. $10k is probably the minimum amount that makes sense for active manual farming, which still only makes sense for a more long-term farms like COMP or CRV, at the cost of not maximizing APR. I have spent over $3k in gas during the last two months by farming very actively. Below $100k, or if you don't want to spend a lot of time on this, it's probably best to deposit your funds into one of yearn vaults that yield farms for users. https://yearn.finance/vaults
A partial list of current yield farms (feel free to comment with more farms! I can edit and add them to this list):

• COMP farming, the oldest one (I think?). Relatively low returns (58% on DAI), safe, no price risk. Efficient way to farm is to supply and borrow the same asset (can be done via instadapp) up to maximum leverage possible (with some margin for interest payments).
• BAL farming, provide liquidity to BAL pools. Safe smart contracts (just don't deposit deflationary tokens). Price risk and APR depends on the pair. https://balancer.exchange/
  See returns for both balancer and compound at https://www.predictions.exchange/
  
• YFV finance, one of the many clones of YFI. The seed pool is safe IF you withdraw before the staking period ends (see the security part). Current APR on stablecoins: 121%
  
• CRV farming, providing liquidity to curve pools. Mostly safe - curve smart contracts tself are safe, but keep in mind if one of tokens in the pool collapses (renBTC is probably the riskiest) other tokens are going to get drained. You can see the current APR on https://dao.curve.fi/mintegauges. As of now, the highest APR is for compound pool - 105.27%. It's varying and there's complicated game with CRV voting that impacts it.
  
• CREAM farming. CREAM is a clone of compound. It's definitely less safe than Compound. Initially, it launched with a direct control by one normal address, but recently they moved to a 5-of-9 multisig.
  
• YFII, another YFI clone. Current APR 95%. https://yfii.finance/#/staking
  
• Mstable, liquidity providing with stablecoins. APR about 50% (MTA + BAL). https://defirate.com/mta-yield-farming/
  
• Zombie, meme token. Current APR is abysmal (33.5%) but token may unexpectedly pump, increasing it. There's a smart contract bug that, as long as rewardDistribution and owner aren't set to zero, potentially allows rewardDistribution to lock all staked funds (not steal). Makes zero sense as of today.
  

Analyzing security.
Edit: warning, a new type of scam just happened - degen.money site asked for token spending approval on the attacker's address, in addition to the (safe) contract's address. Always ensure you're approving a correct address.
Yield farms come and go. The key to earning high returns is to be agile and to jump fast into new farms, which requires manual analysis of security. Of course it's possible to yolo in without any analysis, but I don't recommend it. I'm going to show an example on two recent farming contracts (of the first type - funds just sit in contracts).
Original yearn staking contract. GRAP staking contract. Let's load two codes into a text diff tool, like this site. What interests us on the code level are changes relating to the withdrawal capability, which in the original code are limited to the withdraw() function. We can see that the only substantial change is the addition of the checkStart modifier which prevents both deposits and withdrawals if it's too early. As startime is set directly in source code and can't be modified anywhere, that change is safe - if it doesn't throw on deposit it's not going to throw on withdraw.
The next step is switch to the 'read contract' tab on etherscan and look at two variables: owner and rewardDistribution. In Grap's case, they lead to a timelock contract that requires all changes to wait for at least 24.5 hours - which makes any fund lockup extremely unlikely. At worst, we only have to look at the rewardDistribution contract once a day to see if there's any pending change.
GRAP farming is now finished with no security incidents.
Second example: YFV. This one is still active. Contract link. After comparing them we can see that changes are much more extensive. The withdrawal function also has the checkStart modifier, but that part is fine (ctrl-f to check if starttime can be modified somewhere else - it can't). What's the problem is the checkNextEpoch modifier. There's a lot of things there and three external contract calls (mint calls). If anything in there throws, withdrawal would become impossible. Dangerous. However, that only happens after the staking period ends, so withdrawing before block.timestamp >= periodFinish is relatively safe.
Another check is to look at the owner and rewardDistribution variables. Owner is set to zero, but where's rewardDistribution? Unfortunately, contrary to GRAP, it's private. It's possible to read it with the getStorageAt web3 api (although finding the index is more work - it's 3). However, the team has provided a link to the transaction in which they set rewardDistribution to 0 so it's fine.
In conclusion, as long as you don't hold the funds after the locking period ended there's no security risk here. The current period ends on Tue Sep 1 14:02:29 2020, UTC.

Post 1: Basics: CALL, PUT, exercise, ITM, ATM, OTM
Post 2: Basics: Buying and Selling, the Greeks
Post 3a: Simple Strategies
Post 3b: Advanced Strategies
Post 4a: Example of trades (short puts, covered calls, and verticals)
Post 4b: Example of trades (calendars and hedges)
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Ok. So I lied. This post was getting way too long, so I had to split in two (3a and 3b)
In the previous posts 1 and 2, I explained how to buy and sell options, and how their price is calculated and evolves over time depending on the share price, volatility, and days to expiration.
In this post 3a (and the next 3b), I am going to explain in more detail how and when you can use multiple contracts together to create more profitable trades in various market conditions.
Just a reminder of the building blocks:
You expect that, by expiration, the stock price will …
... go up more than the premium you paid → Buy a call
… go down more than the premium you paid → Buy a put
... not go up more than the premium you got paid → Sell a call
... not go down more than the premium you got paid → Sell a put
Buying Straight Calls:
But why would you buy calls to begin with? Why not just buy the underlying shares? Conversely, why would you buy puts? Why not just short the underlying shares?
Let’s take long shares and long calls as an example, but this applies with puts as well.
If you were to buy 100 shares of the company ABC currently trading at $20. You would have to spend $2000. Now imagine that the share price goes up to $25, you would now have $2500 worth of shares. Or a 25% profit.
If you were convinced that the price would go up, you could instead buy call options ATM or OTM. For example, an ATM call with a strike of $20 might be worth $2 per share, so $200 per contract. You buy 10 contracts for $2000, so the same cost as buying 100 shares. Except that this time, if the share price hits $25 at expiration, each contract is now worth $500, and you now have $5000, for a $3000 gain, or a 150% profit. You could even have bought an OTM call with a strike of $22.50 for a lower premium and an even higher profit.
But it is fairly obvious that this method of buying calls is a good way to lose money quickly. When you own shares, the price goes up and down, but as long as the company does not get bankrupt or never recovers, you will always have your shares. Sometimes you just have to be very patient for the shares to come back (buying an index ETF increases your chances there). But by buying $2000 worth of calls, if you are wrong on the direction, the amplitude, or the time, those options become worthless, and it’s a 100% loss, which rarely happens when you buy shares.
Now, you could buy only one contract for $200. Except for the premium that you paid, you would have a similar profit curve as buying the shares outright. You have the advantage though that if the stock price dropped to $15, instead of losing $500 by owning the shares, you would only lose the $200 you paid for the premium. However, if you lose these $200 the first month, what about the next month? Are you going to bet $200 again, and again… You can see that buying calls outright is not scalable long term. You need a very strong conviction over a specific period of time.
How to buy cheaper shares? Sell Cash Covered Put.
Let’s continue on the example above with the company ABC trading at $20. You may think that it is a bit expensive, and you consider that $18 is a more acceptable price for you to own that company.
You could sell a put ATM with a $20 strike, for $2. Your break-even point would be $18, i.e. you would start losing money if the share price dropped below $18. But also remember that if you did buy the shares outright, you would have lost more money in case of a price drop, because you did not get a premium to offset that loss. If the price stays above $20, your return for the month will be 11% ($200 / $1800).
Note that in this example, we picked the ATM strike of $20, but you could have picked a lower strike for your short put, like an OTM strike of $17.50. Sure, the premium would be lower, maybe $1 per share, but your break-even point would drop from $18 to $16.50 (only 6% return then per month, not too shabby).
The option trade will usually be written like this:
SELL -1 ABC 100 17 JUL 20 17.5 PUT @ 1.00
This means we sold 1 PUT on ABC, 100 shares per contract, the expiration date is July 17, 2020, and the strike is $17.5, and we sold it for $1 per share (so $100 credit minus fees).
With your $20 short put, you will get assigned the shares if the price drops below $20 and you keep it until expiration, however, you will have paid them the equivalent of $18 each (we’ll actually talk more about the assignment later). If your short put expires worthless, you keep the premium, and you may decide to redo the same trade again. The share price may have gone up so much that the new ATM strike does not make you comfortable, and that’s fine as you were not willing to spend more than $18 per share, to begin with, anyway. You will have to wait for some better conditions.
This strategy is called a cash covered put. In a taxable account, depending on your broker, you can have it on margin with no cash needed (you will need to have some other positions to provide the buying power). Beware that if you don’t have the cash to cover the shares, it is adding some leverage to your overall position. Make sure you account for all your potential risks at all times. The nice thing about this position is that as long as you are not assigned, you don’t actually need to borrow some money, it won’t cost you anything. In an IRA account, you will need to have the cash available for the assignment (remember in this example, you only need $1800, plus trading fees).
Let’s roll!
Now one month later, the share price is between $18 and $22, there are few days of expiration left, and you don’t want to be assigned, but you want to continue the same process for next month. You could close the current position, and reopen a new short put, or you could in one single transaction buy back your current short put, and sell another put for next month. Doing one trade instead of two is usually cheaper because you reduce the slippage cost. The closing of the old position and re-opening of a new short position for the next expiration is called rolling the short option (from month to month, but you can also do this with weekly options).
The croll can be done a week or even a few days before expiration. Remember to avoid expiration days, and be careful being short an option on ex-dividend dates. When you roll month to month with the same strike, for most cases, you will get some money out of it. However, the farther your strike is from the current share price, the less additional premium you will get (due to the lower extrinsic value on the new option), and it can end up being close to $0. At that point, given the risk incurred, you may prefer to close the trade altogether or just be assigned. During the roll, depending on if the share price moved a bit, you can adjust the roll up or down. For example, you buy back your short put at $18, and you sell a new short put at $17 or $19, or whatever value makes the most sense.
Assignment
Now, let’s say that the share price finally dropped below $20, and you decided not to roll, or it dropped so much that the roll would not make sense. You ended up getting your shares assigned at a strike price of $18 per share. Note that the assigned share may have a current price much lower than $18 though. If that’s the case, remember that you earned more money than if you bought the shares outright at $20 (at least, you got to keep the $2 premium). And if you rolled multiple times, every premium that you got is additional money in your account.
Want to sell at a premium? Sell Covered Calls.
You could decide to hold onto the shares that you got at a discount, or you may decide that the stock price is going to go sideways, and you are fine collecting more theta. For example, you could sell a call at a strike of $20, for example for $1 (as it is OTM now given the stock price dropped).
SELL -1 ABC 100 17 JUL 20 20 CALL @ 1.00
When close to the expiration time, you can either roll your calls again, the same way that you rolled your puts, as much as you can, or just get assigned if the share price went up. As you get assigned, your shares are called away, and you receive $2000 from the 100 shares at $20 each. Except that you accumulated more money due to all the premiums you got along the way.
This sequence of the short put, roll, roll, roll, assignment, the short call, roll, roll, roll, is called the wheel.
It is a great strategy to use when the market is trading sideways and volatility is high (like currently). It is a low-risk trade provided that the share you pick is not a risky one (pick a market ETF to start) perfect to get create some income with options. There are two drawbacks though:

• If the share dropped too much, you are stuck with it.

You will have to be patient for the share to go back up, but often you can end up with many shares at a loss if the market has been tanking. As a rule of thumb, if I get assigned, I never ever sell a call below my assignment strike minus the premium. In case the market jumps back up, I can get back to my original position, with an additional premium on the way. Market and shares can drop like a stone and bounce back up very quickly (you remember this March and April?), and you really don’t want to lock a loss.
Here is a very quick example of something to not do: Assigned at $18, current price is $15, sell a call at $16 for $1, share goes back up to $22. I get assigned at $16. In summary, I bought a share at $18, and sold it at $17 ($16 + $1 premium), I lost $1 between the two assignments. That’s bad.

• If the share goes up too fast, you missed some opportunity for gain, potentially big gains.

You will have to find some other companies to do the wheel on. If it softens the blow a bit, your retirement account may be purely long, so you’ll not have totally missed the upside anyway.
A short put is a bullish position. A short call is a bearish position. Alternating between the two gives you a strategy looking for a reversion to the mean. Both of these positions are positive theta, and negative vega (see part 2).
Now that I explained the advantage of the long calls and puts, and how to use short calls and puts, we can explore a combination of both.
Verticals
Most option beginners are going to use long calls (or even puts). They are going to gain some money here and there, but for most parts, they will lose money. It is worse if they profited a bit at the beginning, they became confident, bet a bigger amount, and ended up losing a lot. They either buy too much (50% of my account on this call trade that can’t fail), too high of a volatility (got to buy those NKLA calls or puts), or too short / too long of an expiration (I don’t want to lose theta, or I overspent on theta).
As we discussed earlier, a straight long call or put is one of the worst positions to be in. You are significantly negative theta and positive vega. But if you take a step back, you will realize that not accounting for the premium, buying a call gives you the upside of stock up to the infinity (and buying a put gives you the upside of the stock going to $0). But in reality, you rarely are betting that the stock will go to infinity (or to $0). You are often just betting that the stock will go up (or down) by X%. Although the stock could go up (or down) by more than X%, you intuitively understand that there is a smaller chance for this to happen. Options are giving you leverage already, you don’t need to target even more gain.
More importantly, you probably should not pay for a profit/risk profile that you don’t think is going to happen.
Enter verticals. It is a combination of long and short calls (or puts). Say, the company ABC trades at $20, you want to take a bullish position, and the ATM call is $2. You probably would be happy if the stock reaches $25, and you don’t think that it will go much higher than that.
You can buy a $20 call for $2, and sell a $25 call for $0.65. You will get the upside from $20 to $25, and you let someone else take the $25 to infinity range (highly improbable). The cost is $1.35 per share ($2.00 - $0.65).
BUY +1 VERTICAL ABC 100 17 JUL 20 20/25 CALL @ 1.35
This position is interesting for multiple reasons. First, you still get the most probable range for profitability ($20 to $25). Your cost is $1.35 so 33% cheaper than the long call, and your max profit is $5 - $1.35 = $3.65. So your max gain is 270% of the risked amount, and this is for only a 25% increase in the stock price. This is really good already. You reduced your dependency on theta and vega, because the short side of the vertical is reducing your long side’s. You let someone else pay for it.
Another advantage is that it limits your max profit, and it is not a bad thing. Why is it a good thing? Because it is too easy to be greedy and always wanting and hoping for more profit. The share reached $25. What about $30? It reached $30, what about $35? Dang it dropped back to $20, I should have sold everything at the top, now my call expires worthless. But with a vertical, you know the max gain, and you paid a premium for an exact profit/risk profile. As soon as you enter the vertical, you could enter a close order at 90% of the max value (buy at $1.35, sell at $4.50), good till to cancel, and you hope that the trade will eventually be executed. It can only hit 100% profit at expiration, so you have to target a bit less to get out as soon as you can once you have a good enough profit. This way you lock your profit, and you have no risk anymore in case the market drops afterwards.
These verticals (also called spreads) can be bullish or bearish and constructed as debit (you pay some money) or credit (you get paid some money). The debit or credit versions are equivalent, the credit version has a bit of a higher chance to get assigned sooner, but as long as you check the extrinsic value, ex-dividend date, and are not too deep ITM you will be fine. I personally prefer getting paid some money, I like having a bigger balance and never have to pay for margin. :)
Here are the 4 trades for a $20 share price:
CALL BUY 20 ATM / SELL 25 OTM - Bullish spread - Debit
CALL BUY 25 OTM / SELL 20 ATM - Bearish spread - Credit
PUT BUY 20 ATM / SELL 25 ITM - Bullish spread - Credit
PUT BUY 25 ITM / SELL 20 ATM - Bearish spread - Debit
Because both bullish trades are equivalent, you will notice that they both have the same profit/risk profile (despite having different debit and credit prices due to the OTM/ITM differences). Same for the bearish trades. Remember that the cost of an ITM option is greater than ATM, which in turn is greater than an OTM. And that relationship is what makes a vertical a credit or a debit.
I understand that it can be a lot to take in. Let’s take a step back here. I picked a $20/$25 vertical, but with the share price at $20, I could have a similar $5 spread with $15/$20 (with the same 4 constructs). Or instead of 1 vertical $20/$25, I could have bought 5 verticals $20/$21. This is a $5 range as well, except that it has a higher probability for the share to be above $21. However, it also means that the spread will be more expensive (you’ll have to play with your broker tool to understand this better), and it also increases the trading fees and potentially overall slippage, as you have 5 times more contracts. Or you could even decide to pick OTM $25/$30, which would be even cheaper. In this case, you don’t need the share to reach $30 to get a lot of profit. The contracts will be much cheaper (for example, like $0.40 per share), and if the share price goes up to $25 quickly long before expiration, the vertical could be worth $1.00, and you would have 150% of profit without the share having to reach $30.
If you decide to trade these verticals the first few times, look a lot at the numbers before you trade to make sure you are not making a mistake. With a debit vertical, the most you can lose per contract is the premium you paid. With a credit vertical, the most you can lose is the difference between your strikes, minus the premium you received.
One last but important note about verticals:
If your short side is too deep ITM, you may be assigned. It happens. If you bought some vertical with a high strike value, for example:
SELL +20 VERTICAL SPY 100 17 JUL 20 350/351 PUT @ 0.95
Here, not accounting for trading fees and slippage, you paid $0.95 per share for 20 contracts that will be worth $1 per share if SPY is less than $350 by mid-July, which is pretty certain. That’s a 5% return in 4 weeks (in reality, the trading fees are going to reduce most of that). Your actual risk on this trade is $1900 (20 contracts * 100 shares * $0.95) plus trading fees. That’s a small trade, however the underlying instrument you are controlling is much more than that.
Let’s see this in more detail: You enter the trade with a $1900 potential max loss, and you get assigned on the short put side (strike of $350) after a few weeks. Someone paid expensive puts and exercised 20 puts with a strike of $350 on their existing SPY shares (2000 of them, 20 contracts * 100 shares). You will suddenly receive 2000 shares on your account, that you paid $350 each. Thus your balance is going to show -$700,000 (you have 2000 shares to balance that).
If that happens to you: DON’T PANIC. BREATHE. YOU ARE FINE.
You owe $700k to your broker, but you have roughly the same amount in shares anyway. You are STILL protected by your long $351 puts. If the share price goes up by $1, you gain $2000 from the shares, but your long $351 put will lose $2000. Nothing changed. If the share price goes down by $1, you lose $2000 from the shares, but your long $350 put will gain $2000. Nothing changed. Just close your position nicely by selling your shares first, and just after selling your puts. Some brokers can do that in one single trade (put based covered stock). Don’t let the panic set in. Remember that you are hedged. Don’t forget about the slippage, don’t let the market makers take advantage of your panic. Worst case scenario, if you use a quality broker with good customer service, call them, and they will close your position for you, especially if this happens in an IRA.
The reason I am insisting so much on this is because of last week’s event. Yes, the RH platform may have shown incorrect numbers for a while, but before you trade options you need to understand the various edge cases. Again if this happens to you, don’t panic, breathe, and please be safe.
This concludes my post 3a. We talked about the trade-offs between buying shares, buying calls instead, selling puts to get some premium to buy some shares at a cheaper price, rolling your short puts, getting your puts assigned, selling calls to get some additional money in sideways markets, rolling your short calls, having your calls assigned too. We talked about the wheel, being this whole sequence spanning multiple months. After that, we discussed the concept of verticals, with bullish and bearish spreads that can be either built as a debit or a credit.
And if there is one thing you need to learn from this, avoid buying straight calls or puts but use verticals instead, especially if the volatility is very high. And do not ever sell naked calls, again use verticals.
The next post will explain more advanced and interesting option strategies.
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Post 1: Basics: CALL, PUT, exercise, ITM, ATM, OTM
Post 2: Basics: Buying and Selling, the greeks
Post 3a: Simple Strategies
Post 3b: Advanced Strategies
Post 4a: Example of trades (short puts, covered calls, and verticals)
Post 4b: Example of trades (calendars and hedges)

TLDR (for real): The CVP margin rate (currently 77.9%) is actually just based on a cap on the $/share you can borrow. Which means the borrowable $ amount will not go down with the price. The cap on $/share is based on how low the stock has been in the last year.
CVP = the lowest adjusted average price over 20 consecutive trading days in the past year
CVP Margin Rate = Close Price – CVP / Close Price
What's important to note here is the nature of this equation. It's very much different from the static margin percentage that is normally applied. With the static (currently 40%) margin rate, when the stock value drops, the amount you can borrow also drops, which obviously is what causes margin calls (or with IB, immediate liquidation :) ).
But with CVP, the percent is dependent on the current price. So the rate goes down when the stock goes down. It essentially acts as a CAP on the dollar amount you can borrow. That cap is the CVP which is about $490 per share right now. So you can only borrow $490 per share.
If the share price were to drop again, then eventually the CVP rate would drop below the standard rate, and then the actual dollar amount you can borrow against your shares would begin dropping with the share price (like usual).
So moral of the story is that the CVP margin rate won't actually cause any unexpected liquidation. It just caps the $/share you can borrow.
Got this response direct from IB:

IBKR continually reviews its margin requirements with the objective of striking a balance between reasonable leverage and prudent risk management.The leverage offered on TSLA shares has been reduced due to our Collateral Value Pricing (CVP) policy.
The collateral value pricing policy was put in place by IBKR's upper management team and has been completely vetted and reviewed on numerous occasions. As you note, the implementation of the collateral value price (CVP) calculation constrains the amount of margin loan value (MLV) that IBKR is willing to lend to an account based on a new collateral value price (CVP). The purpose of CVP is to protect IBKR from a scenario in which a stock has a run up in price, for which we then allow a client to purchase the stock at the top using the nominal margin rate and the stock subsequently returns to its prior lower price level in a rapid decline. If the descent is greater than the nominal margin interval the potential for loss to IBKR will increase. We seek to set CVP at a level which the stock can reasonably sustain.
The current CVP Margin rate for TSLA is approximately 77%.
Regards, Frank IBKR Risk Group

Update: They gave me some more information including TSLA's current CVP and how it's used to calculate the CVP margin rate.

IBKR's CVP Margin Policy has been in effect for a number of years. The CVP Margin Rate acts as a delta-based house charge. A net delta is calculated for your entire TSLA position which is multiplied by the CVP margin rate and stock value. This policy is not exclusive to TSLA. It applies to all equities.
Current CVP = 493.126 TSLA = 2,235.890 CVP Margin Rate = 77.9%
CVP Margin Rate = Close Price – CVP / Close Price.
(2,235.890 - 493.126) / 2,235.890 = 77.9%

Update 2: Finally!! They finally explained it!! Why couldn't they just say this to begin with!

The collateral value price is the lowest adjusted average price over 20 consecutive trading days in the past year.

Post 1: Basics: CALL, PUT, exercise, ITM, ATM, OTM
Post 2: Basics: Buying and Selling, the Greeks
Post 3a: Simple Strategies
Post 3b: Advanced Strategies
Post 4a: Example of trades (short puts, covered calls, and verticals)
Post 4b: Example of trades (calendars and hedges)
---
This is a follow up of the first post.
The basics: Volatility and Time
Now that you understand the basics of intrinsic and extrinsic values and how together gives a price to the premium, it is important to understand how the extrinsic value is actually calculated. The intrinsic value is easy:
The intrinsic value of a call = share price - strike (if positive, $0 otherwise)
The intrinsic value of a put = strike - share price (if positive, $0 otherwise)
The extrinsic value is mostly based on two variables: volatility of the share price and time.
Given the historic volatility, and the predicted volatility, how far can the share price go by the expiration date? The longer the date, and the higher the share volatility, the higher the chance of the share to change significantly.
A share that jumped from $25 to $50 in the past few weeks (hello NKLA!) will have much higher volatility than a share that stayed at $50 for several months in a row. Similarly, an option expiring in two months will have a higher extrinsic value than an option expiring in one month, just because the share has more chances to move more in two months than a single month.
The extrinsic value is calculated as a combination of both the expiration date (how many days to expiration, hours even when you are close to expiration), and the implied volatility of the share.
Each strike, call or put, will have their own implied volatility. It is quite noticeable when you look at all the strikes for the same expiration. Sometimes, you can even arbitrage this between strikes and expiration dates.
The basics: Buying and Selling contracts
Until now, we have only talked about buying call and put contracts. You pay a premium to get a contract that allows you to buy (call) or sell (put) shares of a specific instrument.
As your risk is the cost of your premium, you can notice that buying options is a risky proposition.
To make a profit on the buying side:

1. You have to be directionally correct. The price must go up for calls, down for puts.
2. AND the share price move must be bigger than the premium you paid.
3. AND the share price move must happen before the option expiration.

You will notice that it is pretty unforgiving. Sure, when you are right, you can make a 100% to 1000% profit in a few months, weeks, or even days. But there is a big chance that you will suffer death by thousands of cuts with your long call or put contracts losing value every day and become worthless.
We were discussing earlier how volatile stocks can have a high extrinsic value. What happens to your option price if the share is changing a lot and suddenly calms down? The extrinsic portion of the option price will crater quickly because volatility dropped, and time is still passing every day.
The same way you can buy options, you can also sell call and put options. Instead of buying the right to exercise your ITM calls and puts, you sell that right to a 3rd party (usually market makers).
To make a profit on the selling side:

1. You have to be directionally correct.
2. OR the share price does not move as much as the premium.
3. OR the share price does not move before the option expiration.

Buying calls and puts mean that you need to have strong convictions on the share’s direction. I know that I am not good at predicting the future. However, I do believe in reversion to the mean (especially in this market :)), and I like to be paid as time is passing. In case you didn't guess yet, yes, I mostly sell options, I don’t buy them. This is a different risk, instead of death by a thousand cuts, a single trade can have a big loss, so proper contract sizing is really important.
It is worth noting that because you sold the right of exercise to a 3rd party, they can exercise at any time the option is ITM. When one party exercises, the broker randomly picks one of the option sellers and exercises the contract there. When you are on the receiving end of the exercise, it is called an assignment. As indicated earlier, for most parts, you will not be getting assigned on your short options as long as there is some extrinsic value left (because it is more profitable to sell the option than exercising it). Deep ITM options are more at risk, due to the sometimes inexistent extrinsic value. Also, the options just before the ex-dividend date when the dividend is as bigger than the extrinsic value are at risk, as it is a good way to get the dividend for a smaller cash outlay with little risk.
In summary:

• Buying a call, you hope the price to go up significantly.
  • Max loss is the premium. You lose money with time.
  • Max profit is infinity, minus the premium.
• Buying a put, you hope the price to go down significantly.
  • Max loss is the premium. You lose money with time.
  • Max profit is the strike price, minus the premium.
• Selling a call, you hope the price to not change much, or to go down.
  • Max loss is infinity (just don’t sell straight calls, at most do verticals - see next post).
  • Max profit is the premium. You profit from time.
• Selling a put, you hope the price to not change much, or to go up.
  • Max loss is the strike price.
  • Max profit is the premium. You profit from time.

The Greeks
Each option contract has a complex formula to calculate its premium (Black-Scholes is usually a good initial option pricing model to calculate the premiums).
Things that will determine the option premium are:

• Current share price
• Strike price
• Call or Put
• American or European style options
• Cost of money (or risk-free rate)
• Volatility
• And the time to expiration

There are four key values calculated from the current option price: delta, gamma, theta, and vega. In the options world, we call them ‘the Greeks’.
Delta is how correlated your option price is compared to the underlying share price. By definition 100 shares have a delta of 100. If an option has a delta of 50, it means that if the share price increases by $1, the new price of your option means that you earned $50. Conversely, a drop of $1 means you will lose $50.
Each call contract bought will have a delta from 0 to 100. A deep ITM call will have a delta close to 100. An ATM call will have a delta around 50. Note that on expiration day, as the intrinsic value disappears, an ATM call behaves like the share price, with a delta close to 100. Buying a put will have a negative delta. A deep ITM put will have a delta close to -100. Selling a call will have a negative delta, selling a put will have a positive delta.
Gamma is the rate of change of delta as the underlying share price changes. Unless you are a market maker or doing gamma scalping (profiting from small changes in the share price), you should not worry too much about gamma.
Theta is how much money you lose or profit per day (week-end included!) on your option contracts. If you bought a call/put, your theta will be negative (you lose money every day due to the time passing closer to the contract expiration, and your option price slowly eroding). If you sold a call/put, your theta will be positive (you earn money every day from the premium). It is important to note that the theta accelerates as you get closer to the expiration. For the same strike and volatility, a theta for an option that has one month left will be smaller than the theta for an option that has one week left, and bigger than an option that has 6 months left. In the third post, I will explain how you can take advantage of this.
FWIW, with the current volatility, I get 0.1% to 0.2% of Return On Risk per day, so roughly 35% to 70% of return annualized. I don’t expect these numbers to keep like this for a long time, but I will profit as long as we are in this sideways market. I also have an overall positive delta, so I will benefit as the market goes up, and theta gain will soften the blow when the market goes down.
Vega is how much your option price will increase or decrease when the implied volatility of the share price increase by 1%. If you bought some puts or calls, your vega will be positive, as your extrinsic value will increase when volatility increases. Conversely, if you sold some puts or calls, your vega will be negative. On the sell side, you want the actual volatility to be lower than the implied volatility to make money.
This is why we often say that you sell options to sell the volatility. When volatility is high, sell options. When volatility is low, buy options. Not the opposite. This also explains why some people lose money when playing stock earnings despite being directionally correct. Before earnings, the option price takes into account the expected stock price change, so the volatility is significantly higher than usual. They bought an expensive call or put, numbers are out, share price moves in the correct direction, but because suddenly the volatility dropped (no uncertainty about the earnings anymore), the extrinsic value of the option got crushed, and offset the increase in intrinsic value. The result is not as much profit as expected or even a loss.
Bid/Ask spread
Options are less liquid than the corresponding shares, especially given the sheer quantity of strikes and expiration dates. The gap between the bid and the ask can be pretty big. If you are not careful about how you enter and exit the trade, you will transform a profitable trade into a losing one. Due to the small contract costs, the bid/ask spread adds up quickly, and with the trading fees, they can represent 10% or more of your profit. Beware!
Never ever buy or sell an option at the market price. Always use a limit order, start with the mid-price, or be even more aggressive. See if someone bites, it happens. If not, give up $0.05 or less, wait a bit longer, and do it again. Be patient. If you are at mid-price between the bid and the ask, and you think this is a fair price, and the market or time is on your side, again just be patient. It is better to not enter a trade that is not in your own terms than overpaying/underselling and reducing your profit/risk ratio too much.
LEAPs
Leap options have a very long expiration date. Usually one year or more. ETF indexes, like SPY, can have leaps of 1, 2, or 3 years away. They offer some advantages as they have a low theta. A deep ITM Leap can behave like the stock with 30% of the cost. Just remember that if the share drops by 30% long term, you will lose everything. Watch out! This is a personal experience of mine in 2008, where I diversified away from a few companies to many more companies by buying multiple leaps. It was akin to changing 100 shares into options with a delta of 250. However, when the market tanked, all these deep ITM leaps lost significantly (more than if I only had 100 shares). Good lesson learned. You win some, you lose some.
Number of shares
The vast majority of options trades at 100 shares per contract. But during share splits, or reverse splits, company reorganizations, or special dividend distributions, the numbers of shares can change. The options are automatically updated.
The 1:N splits are easily converted as you just get more contracts, and your strike is getting adjusted. For example, let’s say you own 1 contract of ABC with a strike of $200 controlling 100 shares (so exposure to $20k). Then the company splits 1:4, you are going to get 4 contracts with a strike of $50, with each contract controlling 100 shares (so still the same exposure of $20k).
The N:1 reverse splits are a tad more complex. Say you have 1 contract of ABC with a strike of $1, controlling 100 shares (so exposure to $100). Then the company reverse splits 5:1, you are going to still get 1 contract, but with a strike of $5, with each contract controlling 20 shares (so still the same exposure of $100). You will still be able to trade these 20 shares contracts but they will slowly trade less and less and disappear over time, as new 100 shares contracts will be created alongside.
Brokers and fees
In my experience, ThinkOrSwim (TOS owned by TD Ameritrade, being bought by Schwab) is one of the very best brokers to trade options. The software on PC, Mac, iPad, or iPhone is top-notch. Very easy to use, very intuitive, very responsive. Pricing on contracts dropped recently, it’s now $0.65 per contract, with $0 for exercise or assignment. You may actually be able to negotiate an even better price.
I also have Interactive Brokers (IB), and that’s the other side of the spectrum. The software is very buggy, unstable, unintuitive, and slow to update. I tried few options trades and got too frustrated to continue. Too bad, it has very good margin rates (although if you are an option seller it is not really needed, as you receive cash when you open your trades). However, it’s perfectly acceptable to trade plain ETFs and shares.
Market Markers
Most of the options you buy or sell from will be provided by the Markets Makers. Do not expect that you will get good deals from them.
You will see in the third post how you selling a put and buying a call is equivalent to buy a share. When you buy/sell a call / put from the market makers, you are guaranteed that they will hedge their corresponding positions by buying/selling a share and the opposite options (put/call).
The next post will introduce you to simple option strategies.
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Post 1: Basics: CALL, PUT, exercise, ITM, ATM, OTM
Post 2: Basics: Buying and Selling, the Greeks
Post 3a: Simple Strategies
Post 3b: Advanced Strategies
Post 4a: Example of trades (short puts, covered calls, and verticals)
Post 4b: Example of trades (calendars and hedges)

Hi,
I am about to start live trade on TOS, for the first time. I have been doing paper trading for a few months. I plan to trade small amounts with minimal risk of loss, in the $10-$20 range, jus to get the hang of it, and test myself in real-time trading. I plan to put the needed 25k for the PDT rule.
The main question I have is about the margin rate TD Ameritrade charges me. What is this rate, and how is this calculated? For example, if I buy a share at $100 and sell at $110, my understanding is that I pocket the $10 (in T+2 time). Is this correct? If not, what should I keep in mind?
Sorry for re-post if any, couldn't find a relevant post in my search.
Thanks in advance for your inputs.

First off, a request to the mods: Can you not delete the post so that people can read what the post was about since it had a lot of content
Other than that, u/Cpt_Tsundere_Sharks post:

For a long time now, I have been playing almost exclusively martial characters, very rarely if ever playing full spellcaster classes. Some people would say that this is boring, that I should expand my horizons, do other things, but part of the reason I play so many martials is that the ultimate warrior is my ideal power fantasy. I don't care for the wizard who can bend space and time or the druid who can turn themselves into a dragon or the cleric who has learned to become the very avatar of their god on this mortal plane. These things do not interest me, they are not the representation of the kind of character I would want to become at the height of their power in a fantasy setting. No, my power fantasy is the man who can take on the world through martial prowess alone. To be a character who has become so skilled with his blade, so mighty with the wielding of weapons, that he is considered an army unto himself. A terror that carves its way through the battlefield, bolstering the morale of his allies and crushing the enemies that stand before him with unstoppable force.
But, therein lies the problem. This is not possible for martial characters in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition.
Now, let's back up a bit and get some context first. Please bear with me, this is probably going to be a long post.
A conversation that I regularly participate in the comments of this subreddit one where I feel martial characters are underpowered in comparison to spellcasting classes. Many would disagree by saying something along the lines of this:
"Spellcasters are versatile with low hit points while martial characters are tanky with good single target damage. That's the trade off."
The idea is that it is fair that a wizard can cast Fireball to hit multiple targets at once because eventually the Fighter can learn to make 4 attacks in one turn and use all of them to absolutely wail on one guy. AoE damage vs. Single Target damage. And for a while, I agreed with this notion. It's only recently that I've come to realize that even if this is true, it's still unfair.
There are situations that can represent a challenge without access to magic that simultaneously can be handwaved with magic. Stealth can be trivialized through Pass Without a Trace or higher level castings of Invisibility. Uncross-able divides can be crossed with Dimension Door or Arcane Gate or even just a simple Misty Step. A person can be convinced to do something with a casting of Suggestion or forced to do something with Dominate Person. These are the things that magic is capable of accomplishing. And this capacity to be useful in a myriad of circumstances is one of the great draws of being able to cast magic.
However, it's considered to be a fair trade that martial characters are not good/completely incapable of accomplishing such things simply because they are good at being able to hit things. Not even things, but a singular thing. Single target damage. Only Fighters get more than two attacks per Action, so getting mobbed by a large number of enemies at once is very bad for any martial character that is not a Fighter, and only marginally less bad if you are a Fighter. The problem of course is simply that they aren't capable of hitting them all at once. The martial's current role in a party is that they are supposed to be the ones who deal a large amount of damage to the boss enemy on their turn. The Barbarian uses their Reckless attack to roll 4d20 and try to get a Brutal Critical on the Demogorgon, the Fighter uses their Action Surge to try and hit the Adult Red Dragon 8 times, the Paladin uses all of their highest level spell slots to Divine Smite Acererak for 7d8 Radiant Damage. Lots of damage, but only on the single enemy. I find this to be unfair as a trade off for two primary reasons:
It feels bad to be only good at fighting single enemies. All of these martial examples are not likely to be good at skill checks. Good at what they're good at, sure, but most characters will only end up with between 4 and 6 proficiencies unless they're a Rogue or take the Skilled Feat. And in all of these cases, the optimal stat distribution causes them to not be naturally good at other things as well. Barbarians are very multi-ability-dependent, needing high Strength and Constitution but then also needing Dexterity to bump up their AC, each being prioritized in that order. That means the other three mental stats will become worse. Fighters also tend to prioritize Strength and Constitution (if you're playing the classic archetype) and most Paladins do the same with Charisma being a tertiary stat since it is their spellcasting. So with all of them prioritizing Strength and Constitution, there is only a single skill (Athletics) between those two abilities. Even if you play a Dexterity Fighter, you're only getting good at 3 skills. As opposed to a Wizard or a Druid or a Cleric who put their points into their main stat and become decent at 5 skills as a result. Whether martial or spellcaster, all of these classes get 2 proficiencies to start. But by nature spellcasters will be skilled at more things than the martials will be because their main stats are better for more things. So it feels like being a martial makes you only good at fighting single enemies while spellcasters get to be good at fighting multiple enemies, getting over impassable obstacles, and many different kinds of skill checks. Which brings me to my second reason.
Spellcasters are actually just as good or better at single target damage than martial characters. The average damage for a failed save on Meteor Swarm is about 50% more than the average damage for 8 successful hits with a greatsword as a Fighter using Action Surge.
Meteor Swarm: 20d6(rolls of 3)+20d6(rolls of 4) = 140
8 Greatsword Attacks with 20 Strength: 16d6(rolls of 3 and 4) + 40 = 96
"But that's a 9th level spell vs Action Surge. Of course the 9th level spell is more powerful."
Let's compare instead a mid level Wizard vs a mid level Barbarian using the Comprehensive Damage Per Round Calculator.
Wizard lvl 12
First round animate object as a 6th lvl spell vs. ac 17
- dmg output 48.3
Second and third round animate object + 2 castings of Cone of Cold
- dmg output 78.3*2
Total damage for a lvl 12 wizard in 3 rounds: 204.9
Barbarian lvl 12
Human barbarian, 20 str, PaM, GWM, a +1 glaive vs. ac 17
+5 to hit (10-5 from GWM)
First round bonus action rage and 2 reckless attacks
1d10+1(Glaive)+5(str)+3(rage)+10(GWM)
- dmg output 36.3
Second and third round
glaive attack and bonus action attack with the end.
- dmg output 52.1*2
Total damage for a lvl 12 barbarian in 3 rounds: 140.5
As you can see, the Wizard handily outstrips the Barbarian. And we even gave the Barbarian a magic item and feats that time. Spellcasting classes are capable of outputting just as much or more single target damage as a martial class. The argument that is often made after this is that a martial class can continue to output this throughout the course of a day whereas a spellcaster has to use many resources that they can only get back later, but I contest this by saying most people don't have that many encounters per day and that while a martial can sustain this damage over the course of several rounds, most encounters will not last long that long anyways. All the enemies will be dead before a martial can stack up enough hits to match what the spellcaster has already done. Even if we do assume multiple rests and encounters over a day, the Wizard can use Arcane Recovery to get back the 6th level spell slot they just used. So they're still probably just fine for the next encounter.
So for those two reasons, I present the case that martials truly are left in the dust by spellcasters in almost every regard. That's the context for this. But this isn't just me crying because I'm a power gamer who wants to be OP. More than just the mathematics of it, I feel that there is a power fantasy is left almost entirely unfulfilled for martial characters.
What is it that makes warrior characters in movies and stories stand out, look cool, and feel powerful?
What does Captain America do? https://youtu.be/oRwFd1G6_U4?t=42
What does The Punisher do? https://youtu.be/01SYT5MPsHw?t=28
What does The Bride in Kill Bill do? https://youtu.be/a3aFv8IQb4s?t=319
Neo and Trinity do? https://youtu.be/NgAmX8GRwDw?t=57
Aragorn? (the most classic of all fantasy warrior archetypes) https://youtu.be/wSgeEH-Zwbk?t=3
Thor? (yes, even though he uses magic I still argue he's a martial character because of the way that he primarily engages in physical combat) https://youtu.be/-mHaq88BAV4?t=131
Ip Man? https://youtu.be/Kv9ygN2B8WU?t=97
John Wick? https://youtu.be/SamAItb8L58?t=86
Or John Wick? https://youtu.be/0L9SzBANF0w?t=264
Or what about John Wick? https://youtu.be/ElZ9y6l9KhI
A common theme with all of these characters is that they can fight many opponents at once and still win. Whether outnumbered by a handful or outnumbered by a hundred, they make a real contest out of something that would and should make instant losers out of anybody else. When they do it by themselves, they're badass. When they do it in the middle of a battlefield, their martial prowess inspires the common soldiers around them. This is all part of the fantasy of being a powerful non-magic fighting character. I put in John Wick three times because the whole draw of his character is that he's so hyper-competent at killing that he can take down entire organizations of enemies by himself. Even in a world of assassins and professional killers, they consider him their Boogeyman. And this character was so popular it spawned a franchise that thusfar has made more than $500 million dollars at the box office. But the part where he has a 1v1 with the bad guy is not what makes us like him. It's arguably the most underwhelming part of the first John Wick movie. Being able to fight many enemies is often cooler than fighting a single skilled enemy.
https://youtu.be/WAwl1mprHZI?t=153
Take this clip from the movie Hero as a prime example that shows both ends of the spectrum. In the first half of the scene, two people are fighting their way through a literal army on their own and winning. In the second half of the scene, there is a duel between two swordmasters. And while the duel exhibits great skill, it is not the more impressive half of the scene. To put it another way, the thing that makes you think Broken Sword is skilled is not that he duels the Emperor. Rather, it's the other way around. You believe that the Emperor is skilled because he is capable of fighting Broken Sword, a man who just cut his way through an entire army with the help of only one other person.
https://youtu.be/fLxSRdnGucA
The pinnacle of a martial character's "cool factor" is not the ability to be able to participate in skilled single combat against someone of equal skill, but to be outnumbered so dramatically that there should be no chance of winning, and yet they can and do anyways. The odds and logic of the situation tell you that it is impossible. But they accomplish the impossible with nothing but the swiftness of their sword.
Now, don't get me wrong, one on one fights definitely are cool. But what can take an entire scene to establish that competence can be established in seconds using a battle in which the hero is heavily outnumbered. They are cool in different ways, one being naturally more drawn out than the other, but it's important to have both. If you're only limited to one or the other but not both, that kind of sucks.
https://youtu.be/xT66YPk0Q5w?t=190
https://youtu.be/jx9Phl04VSQ?t=905
Back to D&D, it is not possible to be this kind of character as a martial. Firstly, due to the mathematics and action economy of the system, it is always more efficient to put all of your damage onto a single target because it's hard to spread out. Secondly because you are limited in the number of attacks you can make, that puts a hard limit on the number of enemies you can kill per turn. 20th level Fighter with 4 attacks? Barring specific subclass abilities or feats, it's literally impossible to exceed killing that number of enemies. Even with feats, you only max out at 5 attacks (using the bonus action attack from Great Weapon Master) on your turn without using Action Surge. If you are outnumbered 100 to 1, how long do you think a 20th level martial character could last? Say you're a 20th level Fighter against 100 Goblins, no Great Weapon Master feat. Assuming you hit with 100% accuracy and kill every one of them in one shot and use both of your Action Surges, it will take you 23 turns to kill them all. And for each one of your turns, they can also make their turn, surrounding you on all sides and attacking you 8 times a turn in response. For ease of calculation, if you had 18 AC wearing non-magical plate armor, Mob Combat rules (found on DMG page 250) assume you are statistically likely to take 12 damage per turn. 252 damage (using average damage) over 21 turns of keeping you surrounded. If you have enemies that aren't CR 1/4 against a 20th level character, say 100 CR 1/2 Thugs, they could make two attacks each, that turns into 16 times per turn and that turns into 30 damage per turn. 630 damage over 21 turns. If the Fighter had 20 Constitution and maximum health rolls (10 on a d10) at every level, they would have 300 hit points. They would barely survive against the goblins. They would not survive against the thugs. That's not even including the possibility of being attacked from range with shortbows and crossbows and such. Eventually, you will lose. And it won't even really be close.
We think these characters should be capable of surviving situations like these, after all at 20th level any Fighter should be a legendary character based on their prowess and skill. But the way the game works, they just aren't capable of surviving.
What is the power fantasy of a spellcaster? To be so powerful that they can bend reality to their will? To cast magics that affect the very fabric of existence? Could a 20th level spellcaster survive a 1 v 100? Quite handily I think actually. How about a 1 v 1000? Well, given that Meteor Swarm allows you to make explosions of 40d6 damage in a 40 foot radius in 4 different locations, you could actually hit 900 creatures at once if they were all bunched up enough (each meteor can hit 225 creatures at peak efficiency). Turn that down to a 1 v 100 real quick. Mathematically, it's entirely possible simply because they can deal enough damage at a fast enough rate combined with the myriad of spells they can use for damage mitigation (Shield, Blade Ward, Blink, Stoneskin, Mirror Image, Blur, etc.)
Many might argue that this is fair, as it is unrealistic for a single person to be able to fight 100 people at once without magic and win. That could never happen in real life. But then I would counter with this:
Aren't we playing Dungeons and Dragons?
Is it realistic for someone to be able to pull meteors out of orbit with their mind? Or open up gates to other dimensions because they figured out how to tear holes in reality? Or to have discovered a word that is so powerful, so forbidden, that simply speaking it can cause another person to drop dead on the spot? Or to raise an undead army of skeletons? Why does realism become the limit for a Fighter when the Wizard's entire existence is predicated on breaking the rules of our reality?
Almost any spellcaster's power fantasy can come true. If you want to be someone who causes explosions on the battlefield, you can do that. If you want to be someone who turns illusions into reality, you can do that. If you want to be a seer who prophesies the future, you can do that. If you want to take over the world with thousands of full powered spellcasting clones of yourself, you can even do that. You are more limited by your own imagination and creativity than the actual rules of the game. But the simple fantasy of "I want to be able to fight a bunch of guys at once" is out of reach of the martial character, despite the fact that it's supposed to be the primary thing they're good at.
To summarize and conclude, I am of the opinion that the most common image of a skilled fantasy warrior is exemplified in their ability to fight a large number of enemies at once or in quick succession, not their ability to handily defeat a single opponent. The biggest design flaw and biggest disappointment for martial characters is their inability to fulfill this fantasy. Their single target damage is mechanically what they are known for, but I think what martial players like me really want more than anything is to be able to fight many enemies at once. I believe one of the ultimate power fantasies for a martial character is to be able to fearlessly charge forward into any number of enemies with full confidence of victory until a suitable challenger approaches. If Dungeons and Dragons is a game of wish fulfillment, the wishes of martial players like me cannot be fulfilled as it is currently designed.
https://youtu.be/qLJMDDxt408?t=25
I've been looking at old playtest packets for 5th edition and I found out some interesting things. The 11th level Hunter Ranger feature, Multiattack used to be something that any martial character had a choice to take at some point. Whirlwind Attack was available to be learned by Fighters and Monks, and Volley was on the list of Fighter maneuvers that could be learned. It seems to me that the reason that martial characters are so subpar in comparison now is that they were watered down across the board, mechanics that used to be able to be used by many are currently sequestered into individual subclasses.
Now, to be clear, I'm not really looking for a "solution" to this problem. At least not as far as 5th edition is concerned. The issues are too fundamental, too rooted in the core of the system to solve without an egregious amount of homebrewing. But I did want to put this out there as a topic of discussion to see if others in the community find validity in my idea. Is the problem of "linear fighters vs quadratic wizards" just an issue of efficiency, versatility, and mathematics? Or is the true problem that martial characters lack the ability to fulfill what is probably one of the core wishes of people who want to be warriors in fantasy settings?
edits: many typos I spotted after the fact -_-
Edit 2:
There's a lot of common responses I keep seeing pop up here that I want to address here in the main post.
"This is a game of resource management, you should just have more encounters per day to balance it out!"
First of all, this isn't something that a player can do themselves. This is entirely dependent on a DM and it's much more work for them to do so and be accommodating. They have to balance every encounter. It isn't as simple as just "having more encounters." Someone has to do that work.
Second of all, I mentioned this, but at a certain point it just becomes a slog when you're being constantly worn down every day just to give enough time for turtle martials to catch up to rabbit spellcasters. I don't know about you, but even as a martial, I wouldn't have fun doing this all the time.
Third of all, it completely ignores the point of my post. I don't care about being able to mathematically catch up to the wizard over the course of a day, I want to feel badass in my own right and I want to be able to do it whenever I want. It doesn't matter that a Wizard can cast Meteor Swarm once per day and I can use Action Surge once/twice per short rest. The point is that I use it and I'm done. And until I get that next short rest, I'm just as weak as a Wizard. Fighters can "recover" more quickly than spellcasters, but in the actual encounter? In the actual fight? They have less resources that they can burn through more quickly than spellcasters. This is the crux of the problem here. Without rests, there is nothing that makes a Fighter better than a Wizard. Anything I can do, he can do better, 🎶 he can do anything better than me. 🎶
It's basically the same thing as saying a Wizard can finish a marathon with their spells but then they'll be really tired when they're done. You can finish the marathon too if you take a few hour long rests along the way. Why can't I just finish the marathon with my own strength? Am I at least faster at sprinting the hundred meter dash? No, the Wizard is faster at that too, but you'll be able to do another hundred meter dash in an hour or so. He still can too, he'll just be marginally slower than you.
Do you see the problem with this argument yet?
"Martial characters should be getting magic items to make them better and then they'll be as good as spellcasters."
But spellcasters don't need magic items. This only supports the argument that martial classes are handicapped in comparison to spellcasters. It's essentially saying that spellcasters can stand on their own but martial classes need a magic item wheelchair to be able to keep up. Do you see the problem here?
Why is it too much to ask that martial classes can stand at the same level as spellcasters through just their own class features?
"Cleave is a really good tool."
And I agree. But last time I asked my DM, he said no. Maybe I'll get to ask him again, but I respect his rulings because he's my friend and I respect him.
"It sounds like the 5th edition system is not for you. You should try something else, like Pathfinder 2e!"
I would if I could but my group seems happy playing 5th edition. As much as this post is a huge complaint rant, not everything is about me. And I won't DM a Pathfinder game because frankly, I'm not good at DMing. I think other people have less fun when I'm behind the screen and I think I have less fun when I'm behind the screen. I wish it weren't the case, but it seems to be the one I'm stuck with. I just don't have a mind made for DMing.

Please be civil in the comments and follow the rules.