As a broker, there are rare days when risk management simply doesn’t work, when markets move so violently that traders lose more than their entire initial margin. When this happens, both the trader and the broker are sitting ducks with no way out.
Yesterday was one of those days in commodity markets. All major metals hit lower circuits—the maximum they can move in a day. Silver crashed 30%, Gold 15%, and others followed. Btw, Natural gas was on an upper circuit.
In our 16 years of operations, we’ve only seen something like this once before: when Crude oil closed at a negative price during COVID. But that was just one commodity, and commodity trading wasn’t nearly as popular as it is today.
What happened in commodities yesterday can happen in equities too; we saw it in 2008.
The lesson is simple but critical: only trade with money you can afford to lose. You can trade successfully for a decade and lose it all in a single day if you’re not properly managing risk. There’s no margin call, no exit opportunity when markets gap through circuits like this.
