Risk disclosure

Why this page comes first

Every feature described elsewhere on this site, the AI summaries, the alerts, the personal adviser, improves the information in front of you. None of it changes the underlying arithmetic: markets can move against any position, and no analysis engine, human or otherwise, eliminates that. Statements that trading is safe, that losses are impossible, or that a system guarantees a return are false wherever they appear, including in messages that claim to come from us; our fraud warning page covers those.

You should trade only with money whose total loss would not affect your living costs, debts or obligations. If a drawdown of 30% on your deposited amount would force you to change plans, the amount is too large. That test is more useful than any product feature, and it comes before every technique described below.

Market risk

Market risk is the plain chance that prices move against you. It is the base risk of every position: an asset bought at one price can simply be worth less later, for reasons no one predicted and no model caught. Crypto assets can fall by double-digit percentages in a day, and equities can gap down on overnight news before UK markets open. Analysis narrows the surprises; it does not repeal them.

Market risk is also asymmetric in recovery. A 50% loss requires a 100% gain to break even, which is why survival, not brilliance, is the first goal of risk management. Position sizing, stop levels and diversification are described on the crypto basics page, and your adviser will walk through them on your first call.

Volatility and gap risk

Volatility is the size of price swings, and crypto is structurally more volatile than equities. The same property that produces strong weeks produces deep ones, and turbulence arrives in clusters rather than evenly. A stop level can also be slipped: in fast markets, the price at which you exit can be worse than the level you set, because execution happens at the next available price, not the one you named.

Gaps deserve their own sentence. Prices do not glide; they jump, and a weekend or overnight move can skip straight past your exit level. The market never closes for crypto, but liquidity thins in some hours, which makes those hours gap-prone. Assume any single position can open a session materially away from where it closed.

Liquidity risk

Liquidity is how easily a position can be sold near the displayed price. Major assets like BTC and ETH are deeply liquid; smaller assets can have days where sellers outnumber willing buyers by a wide margin. In thin conditions the spread widens, large orders move the price against themselves, and what looks like a quick exit becomes a slow, expensive one.

Liquidity also disappears exactly when it is most wanted, in the panic hours of a shock. The platform's watchlists favour major assets partly for this reason, and your adviser will flag when a requested addition trades thinly. If an asset's chart shows staircase moves and long flat stretches, treat that as a liquidity warning written in advance.

Operational and technical risk

Operational risk is the risk that systems fail: an exchange outage during volatility, a data feed lag, a dashboard maintenance window, or a payment provider's scheduled downtime. These events are rare on major venues but not hypothetical, and they can delay action at exactly the moment action matters. We monitor feeds and display data timestamps so you can see freshness, not just price.

The platform itself is software, and software has defects. We treat incidents under a documented process, communicate what happened in plain terms, and keep the security page's audit log so account actions are traceable. What we cannot do is promise that no component ever fails; honest systems design accepts failure and plans for it.

Counterparty and custodial risk

Your funds sit on the exchange account you connect, not with us. That exposes you to the counterparty risk of that venue: its solvency, its custody arrangements, its withdrawal gates in stressed markets, and its own regulatory standing. Exchange failures have happened in this market's short history, and balances held there are not bank deposits; the protections described in UK banking do not apply to them.

We reduce some of this risk by design, read-only access means the platform cannot move your funds, and by supporting withdrawals to your own verified UK accounts with a £20 minimum. But the venue choice itself carries risk that only diversification across time, taking profits off the table regularly, can dampen. Treat exchange selection as the significant decision it is.

Cybersecurity risk

Any online account can be attacked, and the commonest point of failure is credential reuse: a password leaked from an unrelated service replayed against yours. The platform enforces strong authentication options, two-factor authentication, device alerts and session controls, described on the security page, but your email account is also part of the perimeter: whoever controls it can reset passwords elsewhere.

Phishing is the other main route. Clone sites and fake advisers are discussed on the fraud warning page; the rule that defeats all of them is that we never ask for your password, your one-time codes, or remote access to your device. Any message that does, whatever it looks like, is not from us.

Regulatory and tax risk

The rules around crypto assets continue to evolve in the United Kingdom and abroad. Definitions, permitted activities and tax treatment can change, and a change can affect the value of assets you hold, the services available to you, or the reporting you must do. UK consumers may lose access to certain activities or products as regulation tightens, and past availability is no promise of future availability.

Tax is yours to settle. Depending on your circumstances, disposals may create chargeable gains, and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs expects records; the platform provides transaction history to support your record-keeping, but we do not provide tax advice. An accountant familiar with digital assets is a sound early investment.

Behavioural risk

The risk most often underpriced sits between the chair and the keyboard. Chasing performance after a hot week, revenge trading after a loss, doubling exposure to win back a drawdown, and abandoning a written plan in a turbulent hour destroy more accounts than any market move does. Behavioural risk is also the one risk you can actually control.

The platform's tools are arranged around that control: alerts move decisions to calm moments, the decision log makes your month reviewable against your own rules, and the monthly adviser call is a scheduled sanity check. The articles page covers holding and selling psychology in more depth.

Before you start: a working checklist

• Deposit only money whose total loss you could absorb without changing your plans.
• Complete identity verification before you need your first withdrawal, not during it.
• Enable two-factor authentication on day one, and a unique password stored in a manager.
• Write your position size and exit level before opening any position, then follow the writing.
• Keep a portion of profits moving to your bank on a schedule you set in advance.
• Re-read this page after your first volatile week; it reads differently with experience.

Questions about anything here go to [email protected], and your adviser will discuss this disclosure with you before your first deposit. Related pages: security, AML / KYC and the FAQ.