IG Group Suspends New Account Creation During Market Instability

The London-based broker IG Group has suspended the creation of new accounts, announced the broker. The reason behind that decision is the number of technical issues they have due to the recent Reddit-inspired Gamestop situation.

The CEO of the company, June Felix, wrote an open letter to their clients: “ We are in the midst of an unfolding situation in global markets which is attracting a significant number of new traders to trading platforms to buy particular stocks in a coordinated way…This has caused a significant increase in trading volumes and demands on our platform .”

The CEO also assured their clients that future issues will be dealt in a more subtle way.

I wonder if any other brokers will do that. And what the long-term consequences of the Gamestop shortsqueeze will be for the market. Will we see any new regulation?

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Gamestop 's impact is truly too much, wow!

Right? The whole situation has been wild!

I wouldn’t complain if another same situation can happen in future. The market has been on wild for a week.

Maybe, but I wish brokers were better prepared to deal with such situations.

Doesn’t seem to be in their best interest to do this. Not that I agree with it, but why didn’t they just block certain securities from being traded, instead of a blanket ban on new accounts.

Unless we’re talking infrastructure and system-wide issues due to the number of concurrent users, which could get them into more trouble with trade execution.

Still, these are tech firms.

I wondered about the same. Something seems fishy to me.

Perhaps they were already close with respect to regulatory collateral needed or collateral demanded by liquidity providers. I imagine they had their new user statistics (average deposit amount, leverage used, trades made, trade size, etc.) on hand, knowing that even if a fraction of the estimates came true, they’d be in trouble.

That, actually, is a very good point. I wonder whether they’d ever publicly admit it though.

Long shot it was related to acquisition of Tastytrade

Huh. It’s possible. I wonder if we’d ever find out the truth. Something is going on for them to do that.