Back in the summer of 2018 the British regulator FCA implemented leverage restrictions similar to those ESMA had implemented across the EU. Now, over a year later, the agency issued a report according to which these measure have saved UK forex and CFDs traders some 451 million pounds per year. According to the same report, before the new rules there were about 800,000 active traders in the UK, who held about 1,5 billion GBP in client accounts and two thirds of those investments would be lost within a year. To quote the report: “We estimated that, overall, retail clients lost 1.07 billion GBP per year trading these products. Following the introduction of leverage limits and other investor protection measures, total losses for retail clients of UK firms reduced by 77 million GBP between August and October 2018 alone. We estimate that our final rules will save retail consumers between 267 million GBP and 451 million GBP overall per year”. That’s good news overall, but I am curious how many traders are left out of those 800,000 people.
One person's losses are another person's gain. Think casino. The money does not go to waste, some of it even gets into UK govt coffers.