I can say, that Alpari answered promptly to my message and they also offered to help with my positions. As my position is currently positive, I’m just waiting, till they continue trading CHF. And luckily, as I seldom trade CHF, I will not suffer great loss.
I sympathize with all, who lost their money in the process. SNB was a real ***** this time. Trust no one, they say.
Was chatting to a member of C/S for my broker last night and they were saying that it looks like a few brokers might be out of business as they could be short of the required liquidity to operate. I get the feeling that the fallout from this could be pretty harsh on a lot of people
There was a price gap at Hotforex but their support said that there was no off-market and all profits will be paid.
Just made some profit on retracement of EUR/CHF from the bottom to around 1.00 points liquidity were tolerable, was a bit late and missed on shorting EUR/CHF at the start of this hell…
Alpari UK is no longer accepting calls due to recent events, and refering to their website announcement.
Yes, I’m aware of that. I was contacting them yesterday, about 4 hours after the announcement of NBS and they replied within 15 minutes. And today I didn’t even tried to contact them. I hope, that you will get out og it without excessive loss, Scorpius.
Alpari doesn’t accept new positions in other pairs.
Should I be worried?
Insolvency?
Hmmmm… fxpro.co.uk just cleared the negative balance on my account. -$5k. Am guessing they did same to all accounts affected.
Am sure it will run into millions. Starting afresh like a newbie. How could this be. What have I learnt ?? Am in the hunt for a system that
opposes the crowd.
Alpari UK are shut down.
Or maybe stay away from instruments that are unnaturally pegged and not allowed to move freely as they should, could be a good rule, one that I’ve used for a long time. I readded CHF back to my trading universe yesterday after the peg was released…
I think this is the best lesson.
Still won’t save you from a black swan. Speculating is high risk. The chance of losing your entire account at any moment is real. You can reduce it slightly, but it will always be there.
After yesterday there will be no more leverage in the fx and min account size will be 10k 
Absolutely true, there’s no such thing as a way to be certain disaster will never strike, but some simple measures can lessen the risk of something like this happening to you, such as choosing carefully which broker or brokers to trade with, keeping only what is needed in the broker account and the rest in a bank account, avoiding instruments that are pegged, cornered or otherwise higher risk.
This is not a cataclysmic event and leverage is a necessity for forex trading, both for retail and institutional traders, so you’re wrong imho. Retail brokers will continue to compete for clients which means that min account size will remain very low with many brokers.
However, the question that should be raised by this is: why did Alpari UK and FXCM become insolvent when other brokers appear to have been able to handle the situation? How do different brokers offset their risk? How well capitalized are they, etc.
Could be as simple as how well capitalized the other brokers are and how many of their clients were trading the CHF.
Look at Interactive Brokers for example (my broker) who were out saying they had over 120m in losses however that only amounted to 2.5% of their net worth so they are still totally fine as a company.
Institutional traders use bank capital and have trading limit. I don’t see where the leverage coming from! Surely they will review leverage. Brokers are giving silly leverage to people who don’t understand the concept.
Interesting, FXCM being swallowed in whole or in part by another player then…
Also institutional trading desks use leverage on their trading, although certainly many times less than the ordinary retail trader.
However, what happens in an event like the peg being removed like that is that price gaps and there is simply no trading, no bids or offers, between the old price and the new levels. So the best placed stop losses cannot be triggered and even with good risk management what should have been a 0.5% loss multiplies many many times over. What good is a trading limit then…