Chesterjohn's trade journal

That is very much my concern right now. I believe a lot of the regulated brokers are required to keep your deposits in an account that they can’t touch, so getting your deposit back should be ok. Profits will depend on how well they can weather this storm and how many people are losing.

Most brokers use “natural hedging”, that is shorts vs longs pretty much cancel out and if there’s a big difference then they put it through to the real market to protect themselves. In this situation, the large majority might be trading in the same direction and winning. They don’t have enough cash to put 500:1 leverage trades through on the market, so profits come directly out of their pocket.

There are big enough swings and reversals that a lot of people could well be losing money, but the direction of the markets is very obvious right now.

I’m tempted to withdraw enough to cover all my deposits and just trade with my profit. It’d be annoying if I lost that money, but since I’m isolated at home for the next 2 weeks and don’t have a lot of work that I can do from home right now, it would at least keep me entertained…

Frankly we should expect the unexpected. As I’m not trading
live I’ve withdrawn my entire balance. Next question is how safe
are the banks? Safer than under your mattress. ‘Safe’ is no
longer a relevant word. We can only take all reasonable precautions
to mitigate the risk.