The retail CFD regimes that grew out of ESMA's product intervention, and the equivalent rules the United Kingdom and Australia operate, share a design: the firm must show a standardised warning, and in some cases must include the percentage of its own retail client accounts that lost money over a defined recent period. That figure is not a marketing number and it cannot be rounded in the firm's favour. It is computed from the firm's own book, on a defined method, and refreshed on a stated cycle.
Which is why the first engineering question is not where to put the warning. It is where the number comes from, and whether the platform can recompute it without a human editing a template.
The number is a calculation, not a constant
Firms that hard-code the percentage into a page template end up with a figure that is stale, inconsistent between the website, the app and the ad creative, and impossible to reconcile when a supervisor asks how it was derived. The workable pattern is a single computed value, produced from the client account data on the prescribed method, stored with its calculation period and the date it was produced, and read by every surface that displays it. The website, the platform, the mobile app, the client portal and any generated PDF pull the same value.
Storing the calculation period alongside the number is what makes the historical question answerable. When someone asks what the site said in March, the answer is a dated record, not a guess from a page archive. This is the same discipline as everywhere else in compliance audit trails.
Placement is prescribed, not a design choice
Where regimes prescribe wording they generally also prescribe prominence: the warning has to be clearly visible, in a stated position relative to the communication, and legible on the device it is being read on. In practice this means the warning belongs on the sign-up flow, on the deposit screen, on the order ticket surface or its immediate context, on the platform's main view, on the client portal, and on every marketing page, not only the home page.
The failure mode is mobile. A warning that sits above the fold on a desktop layout can drop far below it on a phone, or collapse into an accordion that the client never opens. If the platform is used mostly on phones, and for retail CFD firms it usually is, the mobile layout is the layout that matters. Test the warning at the small breakpoints first and let the desktop layout inherit.
Which warning text, which loss figure, which calculation method and which placement apply to a firm are set by that firm's regulator. Nothing here is legal advice. Firms serving several jurisdictions must confirm the required wording for each one with their own counsel.
One engine, one rule set per jurisdiction
Prescribed wording differs by regime and by language, and a firm operating an EU entity, a UK entity and an offshore entity cannot use one string. The structure that holds is the same one that drives platform restrictions by jurisdiction: a warning object keyed on entity, jurisdiction, client category and language, versioned with an effective date, rendered by every surface.
Client category matters here because in some regimes the standardised retail warning is a retail obligation, and the wording shown to professional clients differs. If the warning is a static string in the page, the firm cannot vary it correctly, and the usual outcome is showing everyone the retail text, which is safer but then contradicts the categorisation the firm asserts elsewhere.
Translation is a compliance surface, not a localisation task
Where a regulator prescribes wording, a translation that reads well but softens the meaning is a defect. Firms should treat each localised warning as its own approved artefact with its own version identifier and its own review, ideally checked against any official language version the regulator itself publishes. The same applies to a warning rendered inside an image or a video, because ad reviewers and app reviewers read those too, and text baked into a graphic cannot be updated when the loss figure refreshes. Keep the number out of images.
The gatekeepers who check this before a regulator does
Financial services advertising on the major ad platforms runs through a verification programme where a firm's licence and the countries it targets are checked, and creative that is missing a required disclosure is a common rejection reason. Mobile app stores apply their own review policies to trading apps, including expectations about disclosures and about the entity that publishes the app. We covered both in financial ads verification and app store rules for financial apps.
The pattern founders should internalise: distribution is where warning failures get caught first. A rejected campaign or a pulled app listing is a faster and more expensive signal than a supervisory letter, and it lands during the launch window when the firm can least afford it.
What not to put next to the warning
Regimes that impose the standardised warning frequently pair it with restrictions on inducements and on performance presentation: no monetary or non-monetary benefits offered to encourage trading, no cherry-picked results, no implication that trading is easy or low risk. A page that carries a perfect warning and then displays a deposit bonus banner three rows down has not complied with anything, it has documented its own breach. CFD marketing restrictions and bonus bans are the same rule family as the warning itself.
The position I will defend: build the warning as a rendered component with a live number, not as copy. Copy gets forked, translated by a contractor, pasted into a new landing page and left there for two years. A component with a version and an effective date is the only version of this that survives a growing marketing team.
"A risk warning buried in the footer is a warning the firm wrote for itself. If it does not sit where the client makes the decision, it is decoration."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Where a loss percentage is required, compute it once from client data on the prescribed method and have every surface read that single dated value.
- Prescribed wording is keyed on entity, jurisdiction, client category and language, so it belongs in a versioned component rather than page copy.
- Mobile layout decides whether a warning is actually prominent; design it at the small breakpoint and let desktop inherit.
- Ad platform verification and app store review usually catch a missing or stale disclosure before any regulator does.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the loss percentage in a CFD risk warning come from?
From the firm's own retail client accounts over a period and method set by the applicable rules, recalculated on the required cycle. It is not an industry figure and it should be produced by a calculation the firm can evidence, not typed into a template.
Does the same risk warning work across all our jurisdictions?
Usually not. Prescribed wording, the required loss figure and placement rules differ by regime, and some requirements attach only to retail clients. Firms operating several entities need a warning keyed on entity, jurisdiction, client category and language.
Can the risk warning sit in the website footer?
Where prominence is prescribed, a footer is generally not enough. The warning is expected to be clearly visible in the communication itself, which in practice means the sign-up flow, deposit screen, platform view and every marketing page, legible on the device the client is using.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.