The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is the overarching regulatory body overseeing all local European regulators such as the FCA in the UK or the BaFin in Germany. The ESMA has formally adopted new regulatory measures for contracts for differences (CFDs) that were enforced on August 1st 2018. The required changes revolve around 5 components that influence the service delivery of our app. This FAQ tries to clarify what these changes mean to the Stryk offering for CFDs:

  • Limited leverage levels: there is a limit on the maximum Multiplier that we are allowed to offer. Luckily, this doesn't change much from the existing maximum Multipliers, but there are a few products that are impacted. At the bottom of this FAQ, you can find a table with the maximum allowed Multiplier per product.  
  • Remove monetary rewards: It is no longer allowed to give monetary rewards for any benefit in relation to the marketing, distribution or sale of a CFD (i.e. when upgrading to a real money account, for referring friends or for executing more trades).
  • Negative balance protection: clients are not allowed to have a negative account balance. With us, this was already the case so there won't be any change!
  • Standardised risk warning: all our marketing advertisements are now required to show a standardized risk warning.
  • 50% margin close out rule: from now on when your total account value drops below 50% of your initial invested amount, your worst position will be closed in order to bring your Margin back to over 50%. This means that if you have invested all your money into one trade and this trade has a negative result of more than 50%, we are now obliged to close that trade. You can always check your Margin or 'Trading capacity' in your Cash screen - when you see that this is getting close to 50%, you can close a position yourself or opt to add funds to your account to increase it. This way you can prevent your worse position(s) from being closed. Following this link, you can see how your Margin is calculated.


The maximum Multiplier per product is as follows:

Product type
The specific product(s)
Max multiplier
Currency
Currency pair that is composed of any two of the following Currencies:
USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, CAD, CHF
33*
Currency
All other Currencies not listed above
20
Index
Underlying Index is
UK 100, France 40, Germany 40, EU 50, Wall Street 30, US 500, US Tech 100, Japan 25
Commodity
Gold
Index
All other Indices not listed above
10
Commodity
All other Commodities not listed above
Stocks
All Stocks
5
Cryptocurrency
All Cryptocurrencies
2


* Although the maximum Multiplier for these Currencies is set at 33, we set the maximum to 30 to ensure smooth use of the flexible Multiplier feature.