But you wouldn't be? This is a product literally called "InvestDirect" where private individuals are buying stocks and assuming all the risk.
If you don't want to offer margin on virtual currency products, more power to you, that is your risk. But if customers are buying with cash, it seems pretty suspect for the bank to claim that is increasing the bank's risk exposure.
Honestly it wouldn't be the worst idea to have a "Net Neutrality" for brokers.
HSBC are well within their rights to refuse to accept bad orders. HSBC are exposed to specific regulatory risk not shared by US banks. Having a ton of customers go bust because a regulatory change nuked some meme stocks seems undesirable to me. If you don't like it you can always find another broker.
It's like saying that net neutrality exists, because "if you don't like throttling you can find another ISP"
and/or we could tokenize securities onto permissionless and decentralised ledgers and stop feeding the intermediaries
note that a ledger with transaction validation rules which enforce KYC can still be permissionless and decentralised
bitcoin isn't "permissioned" just because you need a valid signature to spend an output
Cash trades still expose brokers to volatility due to settlement.
This policy is likely one part regulatory theatre and one part customer selection. Customers buying MicroStrategy stock are unlikely to be lucrative customers for the banking products HSBC hocks.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/14/hsbc-money-...
Naively, this would imply a fairly low premium. But among other things, this doesn't account for fact that Microstrategy took on a lot of debt to buy their bitcoins. Essentially, I'd like to see an updated and more complete analysis like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/microstrategy/comments/ltypps/sell_.... Does such a thing exist?
Pretty much the whole market has exposure to Bitcoin through SP500->Tesla at this point.
Tesla with a 2% market share in the US, is valued more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, General Motors, and BMW combined (40% of the domestic market).
Toyota makes about $2,500 profit for every car sold. Tesla would need to make $50,000 per unit sold on average, or basically 100% profit on a Model 3, to justify the market cap.
Tesla has 100% access to the BTCs and other asset it holds but there is no access to the market cap. Its a fictive price tag on all existing shares. People use it to compare companies. The money does not exist anywhere and certainly can not be used by Tesla.
My guess is that it's just some middle manager blindly following directives from 2018 that haven't been updated. I can't think of any other reason why they'd ban it when everyone else is moving in the opposite direction.
And I still didn't manage to open my bank account despite filling stuff out online and visiting a branch.
One of the unintended consequences of the Total Information Awareness / financial mass-surveillance AML/KYC movement is banks derisking at the expense of marginalized people and industries:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/comments/de0sys/kyc_is_abs...
https://www.koined.store/collections/out-and-about/products/...
Why would a software company buy this volume of this highly volatile crypto and put it on its balance sheet? Wouldn't the board object?
Yes it is. It's the job of banks to advise on these things.
It is a peculiar position they've taken, they've gone further than I think they'd have to, there's probably some reason for it that won't be very obvious on a non-financial forum.
