Clica aquí si quieres leer este comunicado en español.
For regulatory reasons, in accordance with the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), we are required to ensure that DARWIN portfolios do not exceed a maximum exposure relative to the available funds in the portfolio. This measure is aimed at preventing retail clients from reaching risk levels that the regulation considers excessive and to minimise the possibility of a client losing more money than they have deposited.
This exposure is determined based on the underlying assets that the DARWINs have open, such as indices, stocks, commodities, or currencies; not on the amount invested in the DARWINs.
We must emphasise that it is highly unlikely that any investor will reach the risk thresholds allowed by the regulation, and as a result, the vast majority of investors will not be affected by this new measure.
Only in cases where investors leverage at a level equal to or greater than 3 and concentrate their entire investment in one or two DARWINs, might they potentially reach risk levels close to the maximum allowed by the regulation.
To protect the intellectual property of DARWIN providers, we cannot show the underlying assets to investors. However, we are obliged to display the level of open exposure in their underlying assets and manage the portfolio so that exposure levels never exceed those mandated by the regulation relative to the total funds in the portfolio.
The regulation dictates that brokers must require a minimum amount of available capital to open a certain exposure in an asset. For retail clients, this means that the broker is required to demand at least the percentages listed in the following table based on the open exposure.
For example, if a client wishes to open €10,000 in EUR/USD, the client must have at least €333.33 in their account.
We refer to the €333.33 required by the broker as the margin, and the margin percentage is calculated as the ratio between the portfolio equity and the total margin consumed by all open underlying assets.
For example, if a client has an equity of €1,000 and is consuming €500 in margin, their margin percentage will be 1000/500 = 200%.
Based on the margin percentage, the regulation requires that:
As this measure may affect some of our clients, we will implement the regulation in two phases:
In the first phase, already launched, clients with investments in DARWINs that have open trades can now view their margin percentage in the portfolio header, and the portfolio will take action in the following cases:
Additionally, although investments in DARWINs will not be automatically closed if the margin percentage drops below 50% for now, a notification will be sent when the margin level falls below 100%.
We are doing this so that in the unlikely cases where a client currently has a margin level below 50%, they will have time to act before we introduce the second phase: the automatic sale of DARWINs from the portfolio.
We anticipate launching this second phase within a month, providing clients ample time to act.
As mentioned earlier, this situation will occur in portfolios using leverage of level 3 or higher, with investments concentrated in very few DARWINs, and where losses are incurred in open investments.
In this scenario, there are several ways to increase the margin percentage:
As a general rule, for investors with maximum leverage of 3 or 4, we recommend investing in at least four DARWINs. This way, it is almost impossible for the margin percentage to ever drop below 100%.
As always, please remember that our support team is fully available to answer any questions you may have about these changes via email.