 Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stock Swoosh, and I just wanted to discuss a little bit about the difference between options and day trading. I've got a lot of questions lately about this, where people are saying, oh, you need all this money in order to trade. No, actually, you don't. Now, your account size should determine your risk per trade, whether you're doing a day trade or an option. But options are different from equity trading. So, for example, if you are doing an equity trade, you must trade on margin. You don't need the cash qualifying amount of the position. So, say, for example, I'm just gonna do this in simple terms to make it really, really easy. Say you have a stock that costs $10 a share. Say you wanna take 1,000 shares. You don't need $10,000 cash in order to take that position. Do you understand what I'm saying? If you have margin at a brokerage account to penny on the amount of margin you get, say, for example, if it's four to one, you need 2,500 in cash for four to one margin. If you're on 10 to one margin, you need 1,000 in cash to take a position of 1,000 shares of a $10 stock where if you took 1,000 shares. And again, this isn't about the size that you need to open an account because there's different types of margin accounts. Depends if you go to a proprietary day trader, in which case, a proprietary day trading account, you can open up an account with those little $2,500 in some places less, and you get 10 to one margin. Retail accounts, you need 25,000, okay? And you can't fall under the 25,000 and you get four to one margin. So those are the choices for types of day trading accounts on margin, so you don't need the full cash. In other words, at the cost of the position. And again, I'm just gonna say the stock price is $200 a share. And you wanna take 1,000 shares. That would be what? 200,000 cost. You don't need $200,000 cash in your account. It's $200,000 cost of buying power on margin. So again, it depends what type of account you have. If you have a retail account, how much cash would you need to take a position like that? 1,000 shares in a stock that costs $200 a share. At a retail account, you would need 50 grand cash, okay? And at a prop account, you would need 10 to one margin, 20 grand, okay? So that's equity trading. You don't need the full cash value. 99.99999% of the active traders out there are trading on margin, okay? So you can Google, you can read all you want about it, talk to brokers, I'm not a broker. There's different types of brokerage account. You gotta school yourself on what's out there. And then we have options, okay? Now options, you can have a margin account if you wanna be in and out of it in and out all day long as if you're day trading options. You can do that too. You can open up an options account at any place that allows you to open up an options account. The minimum account value is usually 2,000 to open it up, okay? Your risk is based on the cost of the option. If the option costs a dollar, that's what you're gonna pay. No more, no less. Doesn't matter if the stock is $200 a share. If the cost of the price of the option is a dollar, $1 for one contract, that is all you're gonna pay. So it's very, very, very, very important for people to understand the difference between equity trading options, okay? And it's also very important if you're gonna trade that you understand you don't need the cash required per share in order to trade no matter if you do options or equity trading because of margin or you can do an options account where you can trade the stock that way. It's a different way than otherwise, let's just think about it this way. The only people that will be active participants in the market that will be able to trade will be very wealthy people that have had hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's just not the case. So there's many people that have trade the market. That's one of the reasons the market is so much volume is so active, you have so much play in it. The options and the day trades, you have big moves in stocks and the US market is because it's successful with so many people where they have a small amount of cash or large amount of cash, but even people that have large amounts of cash maximize their position specifically even if they're in, whether they're in options or equity trades because options trades quantifies your risk. It's like the insurance. You're not going to lose any more than what you have on the number that costs to the position. So that's one, two, equity trading. If you're a day trader, you know you're going to be out and slap before four o'clock, so why not use margin anyways? And I also teach people to use stops with the equity trading, which is something that I review in the Golden Gap course. Any questions about this, email me at melissa at thestockswitch.com if you would like more information or if you want to sign up for the Golden Gap course or for the Gap Options newsletter. Have a great day.