Need advise - Margin account and stocks down

[aim-high]

I have about 100K in margin balance (entire amount is margin so interest is charged every day). I have few tech stocks and few fintech stocks. All of them are down from the purchase price (purchased around Nov, Dec 2021).
If I sell all the stocks now, i will get around 70K (Purchase price for all these is around 200K) . To reduce the margin to 0 balance, I need to bring in 30K more (which i do have money)

My intention is get reduce Margin to 0 as I don't know when market would come up. Here are some my thinking but need advise if there are other options

1) Option #1 - Sell 1/2 of holdings. Take around 100K loss. Bring extra money to reduce margin to 0. Wait for remaining shares to eventually come up
2) Option #2 - Sell all of the holding. Take around 200K loss. Bring extra money to reduce margin to 0.

What should I be doing ?

[kork13]

Woof, sorry to hear you're in that position. This is the biggest danger in doing margin investing -- it only works when shares go up.

Is there a due date on your margin account? Or any threat of them calling your margin? Do you have any expectation of your margin shares returning in value at anytime in the near future (are the companies still strong & performing well)? If you have time & confidence to wait it out, and can tolerate the interest, then that would be the least-bad option.

Otherwise, if you need to get out from under it, I would just rip off the bandage & sell everything off & cover the loss with outside funds. It's an expensive lesson to learn, but perhaps the best option.

[aim-high]

Definitely good lesson learnt. Infact,I started margin only beginning of last year. Ofcourse things were great entire 2021 so profits made in shares was lot more than the interest that i paid.

There is no due date on the margin. All the shares that I have , i did do research last year but unfortunately they all went down. I do believe these shares COIN, UPST, BABA, AFRM should come up and perform well. Just cant predict when though.

[JBinKC]

Sorry to hear your predicament. My rule of thumb is only use margin for up to only 5% of the portfolio at most and be extremely selective on the situation as I rarely use margin and I always use it ONLY for a short position as a hedge. I really can't advise you here but I think the Federal Reserve will be forced to pivot before the end of the year.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

You just used margin? You didn't buy options to hedge? Usually that's what people do with margin accounts is buy options so the risk is lessened. I don't know what I would do...

[aim-high]

I had some funds of my own in my account. I bought and sold shares. Everytime i made profit, i removed the profit out of the account. I enabled Margin in my account so i had more buying power so I used it to buy more shares.
now that the stocks are lower than original purchase price, i have about 100K negative in the account. This 100K is incurring interest per day. If I sell more shares, I can pay off some of the margin balance. I didnt buy options to hedge (infact i know options are riskier than stocks so didnt buy/sell options)

[LivingAlmostLarge]

you can leverage more risk with options on less money unless you margin in...