Previously the margin amount was calculated off the net exposure of the account, allowing long and short positions to offset each other. For example, you can see here that with two perfectly hedged trades, I have no margin requirement:
However, following clarification from ASIC, we are required to start charging the full margin on each side of a hedged position - that means hedging increases your margin requirement, rather than decreasing it. So when these changes are made instead of seeing no margin requirement would see 4:
- as well as changed to free margin and margin level%