Risk disclosure, the honest version
Trading and investing in digital assets and shares carries financial risk, including the partial or complete loss of the amount you invest. This page sets out every major risk type in plain language, how the risks interact with each other, and two numbers worth fixing in your head before you fund an account. Read it before the first deposit, not after the first bad week.
Eight risks and a warning
Every card states the risk, what it means for your money, and where it applies, a practical habit that limits the damage. None of them can be engineered away, and any platform claiming otherwise should be treated as a warning in itself.
1. Introduction and general warning
All trading in cryptoassets and shares involves risk of loss. Prices move without consulting your position, and both automated strategies and manual ones participate in that movement. The general warning is simple: invest only money whose total loss would not change your life, and treat any promised return as a red flag rather than a plan.
2. Market risk
Volatility is the defining feature of the assets this platform trades. Sharp moves happen within hours, sometimes against your position with no pause for you to react, and losses can accumulate quickly in fast markets.
Practical habit: agree position caps and stop levels with your advisor before the first trade, so a bad day is bounded by design rather than by nerve.
3. Liquidity risk
Some orders cannot be filled at the price you see. In thin markets the act of buying or selling moves the price, and the difference between the expected and actual fill, the slippage, is a real cost that shows up in results.
Practical habit: keep the bulk of activity in the liquid names the platform tracks, and treat thinly traded assets as a small satellite at most.
4. API and integration risk
Automated execution depends on connections to external venues. Connections can drop, settings can be entered wrongly, and API keys carry their own security considerations if mishandled. A configuration error can trade a different reality than the one you intended.
Practical habit: never create or share API keys outside the platform's own flow, and review your configuration with the advisor after any change.
5. Counterparty and custody risk
Execution and custody sit with third-party venues and providers. If a venue has financial trouble, freezes withdrawals, or fails, your positions and balances on that venue can be affected, regardless of how well the strategy performed.
Practical habit: know which venues your account touches, ask where assets are held, and treat diversification across providers as seriously as diversification across assets.
6. Operational risk
Software has defects, infrastructure has outages, and internet connections drop at the worst moment. The platform is monitored around the clock, but monitoring reduces the length of disruption, it does not promise that disruption never happens.
Practical habit: assume an outage can coincide with a volatile session, and size positions so that being unreachable for an hour is uncomfortable rather than ruinous.
7. Cybersecurity and phishing risk
Accounts are attacked through their owners: fake support calls, cloned websites, and messages that harvest passwords and one-time codes. The platform's measures are described on the Security page, but no measure survives an owner handing over the keys.
Practical habit: verify the domain and the support address on the fraud warning page, and refuse any request for codes or passwords, whatever the story.
8. Model and automation risk
Automated strategies follow rules, and rules have limits. The engine does not understand news the way a person might, it can be wrong for stretches at a time, and past behaviour of any strategy does not guarantee future results. Automation removes the labour, not the uncertainty.
Practical habit: review the monthly statement properly, keep the advisor conversation current, and never fund an automated strategy you could not explain in three sentences.
9. Service availability
Maintenance windows, third-party failures, and severe incidents can make the platform temporarily unavailable, and withdrawals may be paused while checks or investigations run. These events are rare but real, and they interact badly with impatience.
Practical habit: plan withdrawals ahead of deadlines like school fees or debit orders rather than leaving them to the last possible day.
10. Before you start
Four steps make most of the above survivable. Understand the strategy you are funding, including when it exits. Decide your acceptable loss before the first trade, in rand, and write it down. Secure the account with 2FA and read the login alerts. Then keep watching the strategies and statements, because risk that is not monitored quietly grows. The getting started guide walks through each of these in order.
How the risks interact
The risk types above are numbered for reading, but in real markets they arrive together. A sudden news event (market risk) dries up order books (liquidity risk) exactly when everyone tries to exit at once, spreads widen, slippage multiplies losses, and the resulting traffic surge can slow or interrupt precisely the systems you want available (operational risk). In the worst moments, the venue holding your assets may halt withdrawals while it manages its own exposure (counterparty risk), and scammers launch their fake support calls within hours of the headlines (cybersecurity risk).
The practical conclusion is that risks should not be evaluated one at a time, as if suffering market risk immunises you against the others. The habits that matter, position caps, liquid instruments, verified counterparties, a secured account, and calm review routines, protect against several risks at once precisely because the risks travel in groups. Your advisor's first conversation is mostly about installing those habits before money moves, which is why it happens before funding rather than after.
Two numbers to fix in your head
First: the full loss number. Whatever you deposit, imagine it reaching zero, and check whether that outcome changes any plan that matters, a bond application, a year of school fees, an emergency fund. If it does, the amount is too large for this activity, whatever the strategy. This is not pessimism; it is the entry fee for thinking clearly.
Second: the sleep number. There is an amount at which a bad week on the dashboard would genuinely bother you, and it is usually far below the amount you can technically afford. Position sizes belong at or below the sleep number, because strategies are reviewed badly by people who are anxious, and anxious reviews create exactly the impulsive changes that turn temporary drawdowns into permanent losses.
A note on where these numbers come from. The full loss number is arithmetic: it is the deposit figure on your statement, plus nothing, and you already know it. The sleep number is observation: it is the figure at which you would check the dashboard during load-shedding reconnection rather than after coffee, and no advisor can tell it to you, though a good one will help you find it. Write both numbers down before the funding conversation, and treat any strategy pitch that makes you want to raise them as the pitch talking, not the plan improving.
If reading this page has made you uncertain, that is the page doing its job. Uncertainty addressed before funding becomes a plan; uncertainty discovered after funding becomes a panic. Questions about anything here are answered in writing by Client Support and Compliance at [email protected].