An account happens when you deposit money (legally) into a registered investment account at a known financial institution. An account comes in many flavors, the most sweetly vanilla of which are your basic and checking and savings accounts at a bank like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bank of Uzbekistan. A spicier flavor of an account type is a margin account, usually held in the form of stocks deposited into a stock broker's margin account.
Why is margin good? (And it has nothing to do with butter.) It's good because you can borrow in most systems up to 50% of the value of the securities you have in that account. Since the various terrorist acts of modern times, the level of inspection, disclosure, and legal strictures has increased dramatically, so if you have an actual registered-for-realz account, expect that you are sending loving letters to the NSA every time you trade.
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![Finance: What Does it Mean to Churn an Account?](https://media1.shmoop.com/video/thumbnails/COURSE.FINANCE.652_770x433.jpg)
Finance: What Does it Mean to Churn an A...12 Views
Finance allah shmoop What does it mean to churn an
account All right Well back in colonial times before america
was the good old u s a You know what
That i po and seventeen seventy six colonists would churn
cream into butter back then churning involved moving a plunger
in a wood bucket over and over and over again
Really good for the traps and lattes there Not exciting
but well that's What happens when there's No better technology
today churning is something illegal that stock brokers dio and
remember normally brokers pay their own rent by getting paid
a commission off of each trade they do for customers
So churning in the financial sense here means that stockbrokers
are making tons of trades they really don't need to
be making in a client's account in order to generate
mohr commission for themselves they're churning the account to generate
dough for themselves Illegal very bad And sometimes it can
be difficult to detect or stop You know think about
little old ladies not really paying attention to our account
or ah cardiologists who really has no idea how wall
street works They have no idea of the brokers churning
Or not Well if you fall prey to a broker
who's involved in churning you'll end up overpaying them in
commissions And you might even have to pay extra taxes
because they realized gains from all those trades they didn't
need to make But if that brokered does get caught 00:01:26.979 --> [endTime] yeah he's toast
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