Trading 212 closing positions

Can someone please explain this? Why are the positions closed for me? “To protect you from negative balance”, this has to be the lamest excuses ever because when I was on negative - 80% on one of my stocks no one cared about that. This is highly illegal and you should be punished for this, guys be aware of this sketchy app. And no it’s not on CFD

A had this occur about a year ago. I think it’s caused when do a market buy but the price very quickly spikes over your available balance. The purchase goes through but then you owe money.

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happened to me as well. The order executed twice somhow so they sold one for a small loss with the same reason.

Well yes but orders rarely get accepted immediately on trading 212, there is always lag and when the orders goes thru it buys / sells at the price that was back then when submitting it

No it doesn’t unfortunately. Some higher end brokers will honour the quoted price for up to 15 seconds I think. But the prices on T212 are indicative and delayed I think. Nevermind the fact that prices are constantly fluctuating anyway.

Edit: corrected thanks to @phildawson

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It’s a thing that can happen with extremely volatile stocks, there is nothing shady or illegal about it. Like the notification says, it is to protect you from having a negative balance (which is not the same thing as your return being -80%, which is your account value).

Using round numbers for the sake of easy maths:

  • The indicative price for GME is $10, you have $25 in your account so you think great, I can buy 2 shares with my funds.
  • (In the seconds you are going to place the order, the crazy with GME continues and the price increases to $20 per share)
  • Your order is executed at the current $20 per share and you don’t have $40 in your free funds to cover the cost of the 2 shares at the fill price
  • An automatic sell order is created to sell the shares, because otherwise you have effectively accidentally shorted the stock and would owe Trading 212 $15 (and shorting is not allowed on Invest/ISA accounts)
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Where to start, firstly it’s not illegal. In fact it’s very much legal and the trading license requires negative balance protection on retail accounts.

This was your mistake in placing a market buy without sufficient funds to allow for slippage in the ASK between placing and filling.

Indicative and real-time. :+1:

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So trading 212 sold 45000 hcmc without my permission. Received regular notification about sold stock… Nothing more. So is this normal?!..

With HCMC yes I would say that’s very likely.

Market order placed, fills much higher than you have funds to buy, sell order is placed to prevent a negative balance.