Harouna Traore, a day trader in France, thought he was using a demonstration version of British brokerage firm Valbury Capital's platform. He opened an account with about 20,000 euros, or $23,000, after using the demo during an educational course in Paris. Traore racked up a loss of more than $1 million before he realized the trades were real and, instead of quitting, he kept trading for a profit of 10 million euros, or $11.6 million.
Notional is irrelevant. Margin is. It could have been only 5K or less margin, so redo your math. 2500 contracts or less...
5 billion notional in the ES would be around 36,500 contracts. At 1,600 $ margin it would be almost 60 million $ account size. And nobody would ever give you 1,600 $ margin for that size. Nobody would even ever let you take that size, even if you have money.
Probably was no margin if it was a day trade. Or at least they weren't checking it intra day. Insane risk, if the market had tanked just 1%, the loss would have been 50 million, who would have covered that? Anyone doing business at the moment with these cowboys should stop, at the very least the CME should give them a massive fine and so should the UK Financial Conduct Authority.
This article does not exist anywhere. I can't read the article on FT cuz I am not subscribed but I just googled it and I can't see it posted anywhere else. Is this article true?
I found the article somewhere else. But that is no proof as many newspapers use the same source and just copy the article.
Perhaps it is fake news, created to get some free viral publicity for the broker, although the FT says they have seen court filings.
Maybe it was not us$ but Zimbawbe dollars. Then the position would be roughly 12 million euro instead of 5 billions us$.