Charles Schwab
Takes as collateral: bitcoin
Dollar loans only: other currencies are separate books, never added in
Debt and rates count loans made in US dollars and dollar stablecoins. Loans in euros, francs, yen, ether or bitcoin itself are separate books, shown by currency on each venue, never added in.
- Aggregate LTV — the highest LTV the desk's card allows — a policy limit, not the LTV of its book.
10 of 10 criteria researched. What the criteria are →
Markets — as served, not a venue rate
One row per market, as the venue publishes them. These are market rates: combining them into a single venue rate is a weighting across this venue's markets, and choosing one here would be a methodology decision taken in a web page.
No BTC market rows are served for this venue. This venue runs no contracts, so there is no market state to read — the absence is a property of the venue class, not a gap.
Price
What does credit cost here, and how is the price formed?
| Rate formation | posted_cardsourceThe broker's published margin schedule — a base or benchmark rate plus a spread by balance tier (cefi_credit_rates, first read 2026-08-08; pages re-read 2026-09-30). posted_card. ⚠ It is the general margin rate, NOT a bitcoin rate: the same debit balance pays the same whatever secures it. |
|---|---|
| Term structure | open_endedsourceCharles Schwab — a margin loan has no maturity or repayment schedule on the page: "Interest is calculated daily on the amount borrowed and posted to the account on a monthly basis" (cefi_credit_rates.instrument_type = open_ended_credit_line). |
| Rate certainty | variablesourceCharles Schwab — "Schwab's current base rate is 10.25% and is subject to change without notice", and "It is possible that margin interest rates may fluctuate during the time you have an outstanding loan." |
Quality
What stands behind a position, and what can change under the reader?
| Oracle dependency | undisclosedsourceCharles Schwab (schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements), read 2026-09-30. Requirements are set on "market value" ("25% of market value" maintenance for common stock and non-leveraged ETFs); the price source that marks the collateral is not named. |
|---|---|
| Default & liquidation | thresholdsourceCharles Schwab, read 2026-09-30 — "The typical equity maintenance requirement... is at least 25% of the total account value but can be higher for certain securities or accounts", with "Special maintenance requirements... set at Schwab's discretion", considering "volatility and liquidity"; and "Schwab reserves the right to change the margin requirements on your account at any time and without prior notice". Initial requirement "50% of cost" for long ETFs at or above $3. |
| Custody & backing | third_party_custodialsourceCharles Schwab — the collateral is the securities held in the customer's brokerage account at the broker, in street name (cefi_credit_rates.custody_model = custodial_broker_street_name). Whether the broker may lend or pledge them is not on the page read. |
| Recourse | recoursesourceCharles Schwab, read 2026-09-30 — "Like any other loan, you must repay your margin loan along with interest, regardless of the underlying value of any securities you might have purchased with margin." The borrower owes the loan whatever the collateral is worth. |
| Track record | 1 month observedsourceDerived from credit_venues.first_date (2026-08-08), the day this dataset first read the broker's margin schedule. This is a LOWER BOUND on the venue's age, not the age itself: a venue trading long before we began reading it reads short here. Not typed, and not a claim about the venue's longevity. |
Composition
Who and what makes up this market?
| Collateral accepted | Spot-bitcoin ETP shares, where marginable (a claim on a trust, not on coins)sourceThe collateral is the securities in the margin account. A spot-bitcoin ETP is a listed security whose trust holds bitcoin; a holder cannot redeem shares for coins, so this is a claim on the trust. ⚠ None of the three brokers' pages read names a spot-bitcoin ETP or the requirement that applies to one; the broker can set a higher requirement for volatile securities. Which row of its schedule governs these products is not stated. |
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| Book depth & concentration | unknown (no per-venue counterparty count exists in this registry or in the comparison payload, so depth and concentration cannot be established. This is a gap in THIS DATASET, not in the venue, and is a different value from `undisclosed`, which would mean the venue does not publish it.) |
| Observability | price: partial — Schwab publishes a base-plus-tier margin schedule on the same pattern as its peers, so the price axis is obtainable in principle. ⚠ IT IS NOT MACHINE-SOURCEABLE BY THE ROUTE USED FOR THE OTHERS: schwab.com/margin/rates returned 216 characters of text on 2026-08-07, the schedule being client-rendered. This is a capture-route gap, NOT an absence in the record, and the distinction matters - the rates are public. Fill route: a rendering fetch, or the archived snapshots, or the printed rate schedule. NOT YET INGESTED. The rate is the broker general margin schedule and is NOT bitcoin-specific: the same debit balance is charged the same whether the collateral is a BTC ETP or any other marginable security. What IS bitcoin-specific is the collateral - whether the ETP is marginable and at what maintenance requirement. Publishing this as a "BTC borrow rate" without that sentence would imply a product that does not exist. quantity: partial — Market-level only: FINRA monthly aggregate margin debt. Security-level unobtainable and declared (section 8.1). composition: none — Loan-level composition is unobtainable in the posted class (section 8.1). Collateral is etp_share (section 6.1). |
What the loans are denominated in
US dollars — as the venue's own pages state itAssets: USD (margin debit). "Current margin rates Debit Balance $100-$24,999.99... Base Rate + 1.825%" — https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements, read 2026-10-05; "You will not have the ability to trade on margin... in your Schwab Global Account™" — https://www.schwab.com/legal/schwab-global-account-agreement, read 2026-10-05
Each currency is a separate book; the dollar equivalents compare sizes and are never added together.
Backing chain
Each link from what this venue takes as collateral down to the bitcoin it rests on, in order, with how each link was established.
How a chain is read, and what it does not claim
backing_chain: the ordered claims standing between a creditor and the coins, each link derived from a sourced fact already held and carrying it in `derived_from` — the custody cell, the venue's borrow card, or wrapper_registry.yaml for who holds the bitcoin behind a token. A `representation` link has one branch per token the venue takes; branches are alternatives, not a sequence. A link nobody has established is shown with status `incomplete` and names what is missing — it is never dropped, because a missing link omitted makes a long chain look short. `undisclosed` means the party does not publish it; `incomplete` means this dataset has not established it. NEVER SCORED AND NEVER COUNTED: no length, link count or ranking is published, and none should be derived — chain length and link transparency are orthogonal (ETP-backed margin is the longest chain here and every link of it is regulated). `recourse` is what the creditor holds beyond the chain. ⚠ Tokens are identified BY SYMBOL: the wrapper registry is not keyed by chain or address, so every `representation` link carries a `deployment` step that is incomplete — whether a token is native to the chain of the venue or a bridge receipt (one more link) is not established — and a symbol the registry knows to name a different token on a venue is shown unresolved, not given that wrapper's holders.
- broker established — the broker · third_party_custodial
source
attribute · custody_model = third_party_custodialCharles Schwab — the collateral is the securities held in the customer's brokerage account at the broker, in street name (cefi_credit_rates.custody_model = custodial_broker_street_name). Whether the broker may lend or pledge them is not on the page read. - broker_custody established — the broker, in street name — the securities are registered to the broker, not the customer
source
card · schwab · custodial_broker_street_name · published_card 2026-08-08https://www.schwab.com/margin/margin-rates-and-requirements - reuse incompleterehypothecation terms of the margin agreement are not held
- etp_share incompletewhich exchange-traded product is posted is not held
- trust incompletethe trust behind the share is not held
- trust_custodian incompletethe trust's custodian is not held
etp_share (§6.1, D31): a holder can never redeem shares for coins — redemption exists only for authorised participants, in creation-unit blocks. A defaulted margin loan resolves by the broker selling SHARES into the equity market; no coin moves unless AP arbitrage responds. Economically bitcoin, legally a security.
source
The generic axis set
Identical for every venue, identically computed. An axis that cannot be computed here renders its reason — never silently omitted, because an omitted axis says it was not considered. A figure that covers only part of what the axis asks is marked, with what it leaves out beneath it. Collateral, debt and the borrow and lend rates are the tiles at the top of this page.
| Utilisation (venue roll-up) | not applicable — there is no pool of deposits here to be drawn |
|---|---|
| Intermediation margin | collecting (not read yet) — needs both a borrow and a lend rate; the borrow rate is not served here |
| Trailing realised average (7/30/90d) | unknown (not published by the venue) — a posted or filed rate has no daily series here |
| Rate volatility (30/90d) | unknown (not published by the venue) — a posted or filed rate has no daily series here |
| Spread to the pair aggregate | collecting (not read yet) — this venue has no borrow rate to compare |
| Spread to matched Treasuries | collecting (not read yet) — this venue has no borrow rate to compare |
| Origination flow | unknown (not published by the venue) — the venue publishes no loan-by-loan flow |
| Repayment flow | unknown (not published by the venue) — the venue publishes no loan-by-loan flow |
| Aggregate and distributional LTV | 50.0% · ceiling the highest LTV the desk's card allows — a policy limit, not the LTV of its book; the aggregate only — no distribution is read here cefi_credit_rates — the desk's published card |
| Residence distribution | unknown (not published by the venue) — the venue publishes no loan durations |
| Liquidation incidence | unknown (not published by the venue) — the venue publishes no liquidations |
| Top-10 concentration share | unknown (not published by the venue) — the venue publishes no borrower distribution |
There is no score on this page and none will be added. The criteria are published and versioned before any venue is measured against them, and this venue's row is produced by the same pipeline as every other.
Access routes
Unknown (not surveyed yet). No one has looked for an MCP server for this venue. That is not the same as having looked and found none, and this row will not say the second while meaning the first. The listing criteria are published.
Ask for this by machine
| REST | GET https://api.bitcoincreditstack.com/v1/market/venues/broker_schwab |
|---|---|
| MCP | get_venue({ venue_id: "broker_schwab" }) get_venue({ venue_id: "broker_schwab", include: ["axes", "headline"] }) |
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https://mcp.bitcoincreditstack.com/mcp