Background:
I have securities spread over Vanguard and TDA, but wanted to "diversify," and move some of my positions to Fidelity.
In my TDA account, WITH margin access, I have GME positions in 100% equity, e.g. not using margin.
This will be important later: I opened my Fidelity account WITHOUT access to margin.
What happened:
I initiated a partial account transfer from TD to Fidelity last Tuesday or Wednesday. By last Thursday or Friday, I saw my transferred positions in Fidelity. This morning, I downloaded the Fidelity mobile app and saw that my GME position was in MARGIN, which I thought was really odd.
So I called both Fidelity and TDA and discovered the following:
Apparently, since my account with TDA has margin access, by default, any positions that are transferred are transferred as margin positions (from a TDA rep). One of the major problems with this is that since my Fidelity account does not have margin access, I was told that I would NOT be able to sell my GME positions until they were either transferred to cash or I gave my Fidelity account margin access (from Fidelity rep).
Fidelity was able to transfer my position to a cash position, and told me that this would have eventually happened since I don't have a margin account, but it could have taken a bit. So please be careful when doing this sort of process. This was pretty alarming to me and you should know about this.