Do I need to be authorised by the FCA in the UK?

I'm neither working in financial industry nor a full time trader, just doing trading as another source of my personal income. But my friend is about to ask me to do trading for him.

Do I still need to be authorized by the FCA? To be honest, I am not really interested in passing the exams as trading isn't my main job. If I still have to, is there any other alternative ways to do the trading for my friend.

 

i assume you're not a fund entity and that there is a considerable amount of trust between you and your friend. as such, best to get your friend to open an account in his name and then pass you the passwords to manage the money. this way he has full title of the money and you also can't wire money from his account to your account and his only risk is you blowing his money away, which is a risk he's taking anyway. i've worked with similar set-ups several times using ib and ts

 

Thanks, ctheo. How about open a joint account?

 

of course you can open a joint account with them but they may not be comfortable with that since this will give you the right to wire money out of the account and into one of your accounts.

the idea of having an account solely in their name (or their name + spouse) is that you can't "steal" the money. for example, TS and IB don't let you wire money out of an account unless the receiving account has the same name.

i hope i'm clear

 

Will IB not become suspicious that you log in into different accounts from the same IP-address ?

 

Thanks, I met my friend today. He's got a registered Ltd company. So he suggests me to be his company's director and shareholders (only 2 shareholders me and my friend) so that I can take % of profit from the company legally as the dividend. But I wonder that it's safe to me?

 

i don't know. if they do, i'm sure they'll contact the account owner and tell him that there are logins from multiple ips. the owner then can say that there are a couple of people trading the account or whatever. there's nothing untoward here.

there's no way the person trading the account can steal/withdraw money from the account as they can only wire money to an account that matches the name of the ib account. only thing that can go wrong is losing the money on bad trades but that is the risk of having somebody trading your account anyway.

this is a very primitive arrangement but one that works and requiring some trust between the two parties, trust that the person trading for you won't blow up

 

i don't know. you need to get legal advice on this one and you need to understand it and be comfortable with the implications of this arrangement