Can a CFD position wipe out your free funds?

Yeah I guess you would have to still be working out just how much to keep thatā€™s the max you want to play with so that you donā€™t have a margin call when it goes against you and you donā€™t have enough to continue.

I guess it depends on how volatile it is too. If youā€™re shorting average stocks itā€™s not a concern with a normal stop loss set, but a pump and dump where you could face a fast reversal and be in trouble quickly.

if it was still the bull market, you could have easily kept moving the profits in free funds out of the account as the prices went up and not seen any issues. but currently everything is so chaotic now.

You donā€™t go into negative balance hense the margin call and the positions will close

Unfortunately you can lose more than the money in your account. All you need is a combo of poor decision making and some bad luck.

You can get unfortunate if it opens up at a large gap e.g. Wirecard at -80%. That would wipe a lot of people out most probably.

Really? How would this happen when there is negative balance protection? IG say ā€œIf your CFD balance falls below zero, weā€™ll bring it back to zero as soon as possible at no cost to you.ā€ I expect the same is true here as it is a requirement of the regulator that there be negative balance protection for nonprofessional clients.

As a retail client, you will never lose more funds than you have initially deposited to your Trading 212 account. Due to the Negative Balance Protection policy, we will send a margin call, when yā€¦

I have always been under the impression that the margin calls and position close could activate ā€œlateā€ in extreme and volatile circumstances. Holding a large short overnight, the company getting extremely positive news after hours and share prices skyrocketing on open being a very possible one. Iā€™m sure Iā€™d read experiences of it on this forum a while back. Is this not the case?

As a retail customer you would be protected from a negative balance.
You would walk away with 0 funds.

If you activate the higher leverage on the pro account then yes you would be liable is my understanding.

I donā€™t think legally they can do this.
Price is the only metric they can follow, so regardless of news events itā€™s the price on the day that matters most.

If the company goes bust Friday night and the market knows this going into the weekend, iā€™m not entirely sure.

Pretty confident though that they have to act on price alone, as sometimes bad news can be construed as a good signal for the market. Ie: because the market news wasnā€™t cataclysmic the market treats it as good news and rallies on the open. lol

Is anyone aware of the Swiss Franc crash in 2015? Situations like that are beyond anyoneā€™s control and all the measures put in place may not be fool proof. It is rare, but still possible. A good example is when markets are extremely volatile, stop losses can fail to be triggered resulting in people losing all their money even though they had protective measures in place.

My understanding is that since the 2019 FCA (2.45) that brokers agree to say that a retail customer can never have a negative balance and can only lose the funds back to 0 inside the CFD account.

I assume the broker takes the hit? Or they have insurance against it?

I think you might be right, the broker will probably take the hit. So we can all sleep in peace :grin:

https://www.trading212.com/en/client-agreement-uk

6.2. You shall monitor your open positions and shall bear the risk of suffering losses from your trading activity. We provide retail CFD clients with negative balance protection on their accounts. Negative balance protections shall not be applicable to Professional clients and eligible counterparties. Unless you have been classified as a Retail client, we reserve the right to claim negative balance on your account.

and importantly

5.1. In compliance with law and regulation, we shall categorise our clients into three main categories: ā€œeligible counterpartiesā€, ā€œprofessional clientsā€ and ā€œretail clientsā€. We shall treat you as a retail client in accordance with the FCA Rules, so that you shall have the highest level of regulatory protection. Eligible counterparties and professional clients are considered to be more experienced, knowledgeable, sophisticated and able to assess their own risk, and therefore are given a lower level of regulatory protection. As a retail client you may request a different client categorisation from the one we have allocated to you. Please note that we may decline your request to re-categorise. If we agree to such a request, you may be given a lower level of regulatory protection

So if you ask for a higher leverage ratio and do it for a living under a professional categorisation then yep youā€™ll need to cough up in those rare cases and I assume you owe T212. I assume they still monitor it for you with the same system as retail, but I wouldnā€™t rely on it.

Unless you have been classified as a Retail client, we reserve the right to claim negative balance on your account.

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