We spend most of our time here on the part of the account that’s in a trade. Tomorrow is about the part that isn’t.
Picture how a premium-selling account actually looks on a quiet Tuesday. A handful of short puts, a couple of spreads, some long stock. Add up the buying power all of that is using and for most of us it isn’t close to the whole account. The rest sits in the sweep earning whatever the broker feels like paying, and it never comes up in conversation.
Tony Rihan runs the arithmetic tomorrow on a round number. Half a million net liq, $75,000 of buying power tied up in options. That’s 15% utilization, which leaves $425,000 with nothing to do. Put a rough 4% against the idle piece and you get about $17,000 a year, roughly $1,417 a month, gross, before a single dollar of option premium. That’s his illustrative example and not a claim about anyone’s account, ours included. Scale it to whatever your own number is and the shape of it doesn’t change.
The question that reframes the whole thing
It’s his favorite question to put to a room, and it gets at the whole point of tomorrow:
If two investments both yield approximately 4%, but one preserves 99% of my collateral value and the other preserves substantially less, which one is actually paying me more?
Ask a saver and it’s a trick question. Yield is yield. Ask an options trader and it stops being a trick, because collateral is the raw material of everything we do. Buying power is not a number on a screen. It’s whether you can roll a tested put instead of taking the loss. It’s whether you can hedge in the week that actually requires hedging. It’s whether you’re the one selling into a vol spike or the one watching it.
So a dollar of preserved collateral is worth something you can spend. Two things quoting the same yield are not the same investment.
There’s a regulatory backdrop under that 99%. FINRA’s maintenance requirement on direct U.S. government obligations maturing in under a year is 1%. Two caveats, and they’re not footnotes. It’s a regulatory minimum, and FINRA explicitly allows firms to require more than the minimum. And your broker’s actual option buying power treatment is its own animal. Take the number as an educational reference, then verify the real effect on your own platform before you build anything on top of it.
The one that catches people out
An ETF that holds nothing but Treasury bills is not the same thing as holding Treasury bills. Mostly the same issuer underneath, near enough the same economics, different wrapper. The wrapper is what the margin system looks at, and the treatment that applies to the bill doesn’t automatically travel to the fund that owns it.
That isn’t an argument for one over the other. The funds are genuinely easy: buy and sell like a stock, no maturity ladder to manage, distributions land monthly. Owning the bills yourself is more work. The point of the hour is to know which trade you’re making, rather than find out on the afternoon you need the buying power.
Matching the money to the job
This isn’t a ranking exercise. The sweep account, Treasury bills, the short-duration funds, a long SPX box, corporate paper, municipals, CDs, preferred stock. None of those is the answer. Each one is the answer to a different question.
Money that has to be there on the worst morning of the year is one job. Money that should earn something while staying a same-day decision is another. Money you genuinely will not need until a date you can write down is a third, and it opens doors the other two can’t. Tax-sensitive income is its own conversation entirely. We’ll take the jobs one at a time and say plainly which instruments fit each one, and which ones only look like they do.
There is no free yield
At some point in the hour two funds are going up side by side, one paying more than the other, and the question will be why somebody is willing to hand us the difference. The answer is never generosity. It’s credit risk, or duration, or call risk, or sitting further down the capital structure, or all of them wearing one number.
A preferred stock is not a high-yielding Treasury. It’s a different asset that happens to quote its number in the same font. A municipal bond fund can carry years of interest-rate sensitivity, which makes it a lot of useful things but does not make it cash. Somewhere along that list we stop doing cash management and start doing income investing, and we’ll be honest about where that line sits.
Tax comes up constantly in this material and every honest answer starts with “it depends on the instrument and on you.” We’ll flag where it matters and where it’s bigger than people think. Then we’ll send you to your CPA, because nobody on the call is your tax advisor.
Bring the question you’ve never asked your broker
“How much of this actually counts toward my option buying power?” is the most useful sentence in tomorrow’s hour and almost nobody says it out loud. Type yours in the chat and we’ll take it live.
This is a members-only live session with Tony Battista and Tony Rihan.
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Grow Your Pile Office Hours is educational and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Strategies discussed carry different risk profiles; long-premium strategies can lose the entire premium paid, and short-premium strategies can produce losses that far exceed the credit received. A short put can require you to buy at the strike and the loss can be substantial in a falling market. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.
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📅 Tomorrow, Thursday, October 1, 2026
5:00 PM ET · 4:00 PM CT · 2:00 PM PT
Where Should Your Idle Cash Live?
