In the same way many banks and financial institutions should have been allowed to go bankrupt during the financial crisis. Those who took too much risk and were overleveraged should have paid the price (after all they also reaped the benefits before the crisis by overleveraging). Instead the risk was spread broadly across the board and that is why many years after the crisis the structural problems in our economies are still existing. The same players who ran insane risk and should be booted off are the exact same players who now reap all the unrealized paper profits. And they have a strong motivation to motivate everyone else to keep playing the game. As long as there are more stupid people to hold the bag our structural problems will not go away. With or without Trump. With or without immigration controls. With or without [fill in anything you like].
Don't disagree with you here and we all know your stance on ethics, but your moral absolutism doesn't work here. Lehman did go under and it froze the global economy. Now you are saying everything would be been fine if we collectively as a society had let Citi/AIG/BOA/etc fail? Western civilization would have been done. You sound like many coming from the Austrian school of economics. I studied the Austrian way and rejected it. It sounds really good but then you realize the whole system has to be taken down to rebuild it. No individual or collective organization will ever agree to that.
What kind of positions ? They sound like gamblers and not traders if they don't have predefined automatically entered stops on every trade. Keep in mind $500 margins are usually limited to 50 lot or less where 50-100 lot day trade margin jumps to $1,000. In 11 years of ES trading I have never seen a scenario where you would not have been filled on 50 lots or less with more than 10 points of slippage. Is it a risk ? Hell life is a risk. The beauty of day trade margin is it actually lets you lower risk in case the fcm was to go under. Who wants to leave 250k at risk in an fcm when you can get better return with only 50k trading the same size with interest free margin while your other 20Ok produces income for you using other means such as real estate?
That is what some powerful individuals with lots of self interest have been telling us. None of our society would be gone had we let all your mentioned institutions let go. And yes you are right, if you want to drain the swamp then yes, the entire swamp must go. But fortunately only 10% or so of our society is swamp. Unfortunately, instead of us dictating what the swamp has to do we let the swamp swallow up the rest of the 90%
That is a very selfish point of view I am afraid. What about all those accounts of those who ran at prudent risk levels? When an FCM goes under then all accounts will potentially be locked up for months/years. That is precisely the reason I would never entrust any funds to an FCM but only brokers who at least charge the exchange mandated margins and/or charge very conservative margin on cash fx positions.
Life isn't all sunshine and roses. So you don't keep your money there. Easy, end of thread let's all move on.
I believe there is a $20 or $25 fee if AMP automatically have to trim a position - I could be wrong though. However, if playing this game then definitely DO NOT rely on any brokers automated systems to keep you out of trouble. Always keep an eye on the session times and adjust your positions ahead of time.