Your Margins seem a little excessive. I pay 2.4k in total to Trade the SPI with my Online Broker.
Whoa there Sapphire! Read Sleepy's link.
Once again we have to be explicit.
The "margin" of a futures contract is the overnight margin set by the relevant exchange.
Let's stick with my example of CL, the standard crude oil contract. Initial margin = $5,400 maintenance margin = $4,000.
(NB
You only need the Initial margin to open a trade, not the sum of the two. However, if holding position trades in futures you should have far far more money that that at your disposal to make sure you are position sizing correctly.)
I will have to to have $5,400 in my account for each contract to be able to open a trade. Let's say I entered long 1 contract at $70.00. My total margin therefore is $5,400, I have $6,000 in my account so no problem. I have $600 of spare cash in my account.
For each dollar of movement I win or lose $1,000 on one CL contract.
Maintenance margin is the amount of margin required to keep the trade open whitout a margin call. That means that oil can close down $1.40 (5,400 - 4,000) and I won't have to tip in more cash to may account.
Let's say oil closes at $68.50 the next day, down $1,500. I've fallen below the $4,000 maintenance margin and require $100 more margin for this trade. But Lo! I still have $600 cash in my account, so $100 of that is allocated to the margin for the trade. MM is still maintained, but my spare cash has fallen to $500.
No margin call.
Let's say the next day oil closes down another $1.00 to $67.50.
We were already at maintenance margin the day before, therefore another $1,000 worth of margin must be allocated to this trade. But I only have $500 spare cash in my account.
Margin call time.
Broker rings and says, "Dude, we need another $500 cash to keep your margin at maintenance". You will therefore have to deposit the $500 into the account, pronto, or close the trade.
Some brokers have what is called "day margin". That is a reduced amount of margin requirement during the normal daytime session. With IB, day margin is 50% of the overnight margin.
So with IB I can open a crude contract with only $2,700 during the day session with $2,000 MM. So long as I close the trade before the end of the day session, that's all the margin I need (presuming MM isn't breached).
As soon as the session ends (or usually some minutes before the close), the margin reverts to overnight margin.
This is the type of margin sydney_hawka keeps referring to without explicitly stating that it is "day margin".
Some brokers have slashed day margins to very low levels in order to get day trader,s business. Quite a few offer e-minis at $500 and I've even seen $300.
But overnight margin is never lower than that set by the exchanges.