I had this happen last week in a Roth IRA TD Ameritrade account that was not margin enabled. I contacted customer service and it's not technically a margin call but a "cash debit call" though I don't know there's an appreciable difference since you'll need to cover this shortfall. This is caused by a defect or oversight in their trading system that does not account for trading fees when looking at your available trading funds.
For example, if you have $500 dollars, the system will not allow you to buy $505 worth of stocks. However, it will allow you to buy $495 of stocks and charge you $10 in fees. Once that happens, you are now $5 in cash debit call. My trades were charged $30 in fees that I did not anticipate. I actually should have 500 free trades in the account but TD Ameritrade messed up and did not give me the free trades. It took about a week, but customer service I was able to give me back the free trades and reimburse me the $30 to my account to get rid of the $4 or so debit cash call in my account. I had the debt cash call for over a week
Unless there's some error on the side of TD Ameritrade like what I had above, you have to either put in money to cover the shortfall or sell some positions. It took a week for customer service to recover my free trades and my $30 so I was worried they would force sell 1 share of something and charge me $10 trade fees. Customer service says that is very unlikely as they do covers on a case by case basis and basically they have bigger fish to fry than my $4. It would be best to contact CS and ask if there's an issue in covering the call in a couple of weeks. You should also complain that the system has that flaw that I described that allows for a non-marginable account to execute a trade for more than funds in the account. That'll likely buy you the time you need.
Yeah, I'm not too happy with them:
1) What kind of terrible financial software misreports available funds, and lets them go below zero?
2) I have also had unexpected trading fees because they advertise certain "fee free ETFs" but you have to go to some hidden control panel to "enable" it. And enabling it in my HSA did not enable it in my 401k. (they did refund that one fee)
Annnyways....
You are right on the "cash debit call" but it also says "margin alert" on the screen just to look scary.
I did call and basically told them, hey, I bought a fee free ETF. If I sell now I'll have to pay a "short term trader" penalty or something. But it's not a "fee" so they aren't able to refund it.
They said that, as of now, there's no urgency but they "can't guarantee because market conditions might force a liquidation." What? This is NOT a margin account. Market conditions will not increase or decrease my equity. I'll need a couple weeks until my next paycheck deduction is made. We are talking less than $100 here, so even if they do a forced liquidation it doesn't really matter. I'm not worried about getting short squeezed or anything like that.
If they do a forced liquidation do they charge me a trading fee? In which case I could ask them to refund it?
Whatever, I don't care so much about the $10 trading fee so much as the principle that if they are screwing up something this simple, how can I trust their math on anything? What am I supposed to do, pull out my last statement every time and then hand-reconcile each new transaction to make sure the number they say I have is real?
Rant over! If you made it this far, congratulations.
