FCA, SEC, ESMA, MAS rulings, consumer warnings, and what they mean for retail investors.
From tax year 2025 onward, US crypto brokers must issue Form 1099-DA to customers and the IRS for every disposal of digital assets. From 2026 onward, they must also report the cost basis. The customer's burden is reducing; the IRS's ability to detect mismatches is rising sharply. Here is what changes for the typical retail filer.
A German tax resident who holds a crypto asset for more than 12 months pays zero capital gains tax on the eventual sale. The rule has survived multiple government reviews and is unchanged into 2026. Here is exactly how it works, what counts as the holding period, and where the recently-changed staking rules complicate the picture.
The IRS will not ask for "your crypto records" in an audit. It will ask for four specific things, in a specific format, and the difference between a clean three-month resolution and a multi-year examination is whether the taxpayer can produce them on the first request. Here is what each one is.
The UK's tax treatment of crypto is more developed than retail discourse usually credits. HMRC has published a 200-page Cryptoassets Manual, the section 104 pooling rule has clear application to crypto, and the self-assessment forms include a dedicated crypto section as of 2024-25. Here is what a UK retail investor actually needs to file.
Three legislative proposals in the last four years have tried to apply section 1091 to digital assets. None has passed. Here is what each proposal would actually do, what the affected mechanic looks like for retail investors, and how to think about positioning before the rules change.
Every regulated UK and EU CFD provider must publish a number on its homepage. The number is the percentage of retail customer accounts that lost money trading CFDs over the most recent twelve months. The number is real, the methodology is standardised, and the implications for anyone considering a CFD account are larger than the marketing material suggests.
The EU has adopted a regulation prohibiting payment for order flow, with a phase-out period that ends in mid-2026. The change reshapes the economics of zero-commission brokerage in Europe and creates a regulatory divergence with the United States, where the practice remains legal. A guide to what is changing, when, and what it means for you.
Three different jurisdictions, three different compensation regimes, and a long list of misconceptions in between. A practical guide to what happens to your money if your broker or your bank fails, drawn from the published rules of the schemes themselves.
European brokers are required, by EU and UK law, to take "all sufficient steps" to obtain the best result for their customers when executing orders. The phrase has a precise legal meaning, a published policy behind it, and a set of disclosures the customer can ask for. Most retail customers have never seen any of them.
The headline number ("76% of retail accounts lose money") is the most visible disclosure on a broker’s homepage and one of the least useful for deciding whether to deposit. The disclosures that come next are the ones that matter.
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