Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Why does Charles Schwab have a Mandatory Settlement Period after selling stocks?
They're taking advantage of float.  Like so many things in the financial world today, this practice is a (strictly legal) fraud. When you make the transaction, the money is available immediately, for reasons that should be intuitively obvious to anyone who's ever used PayPal.  It doesn't take 3 minutes for the broker to get that money, let alone 3 days.  But if they can hold on to that money instead of turning it over to you, they can make money from it for themselves, putting money that rightfully belongs to you to work for them instead, earning interest on short-term loans, money market accounts, etc. The SEC mandates that this money must be turned over to you within 3 days so it should not surprise anyone that that's exactly how long the "we have to wait for it to clear" scam runs for.  Even if it doesn't seem like very much money per transaction, for a large brokerage with hundreds of thousands of clients, all the little bits add up very quickly.  This is why they feel no need to compete by offering better service: offering poor service is making them a lot of money that they would lose by offering better service.