The leverage caps didn’t protect retail traders — they mostly pushed the riskiest traders toward offshore, unregulated brokers with zero protections.
ASIC’s 2021 leverage caps were sold as a retail-trading safety measure. They were not. They made regulated Australian brokers less attractive to the traders most determined to take outsized positions, then left those traders to seek the same leverage elsewhere — often without the protections that made domestic regulation meaningful in the first place. What…