The EU securities authority that coordinates national regulators, writes technical standards under MiFID II, and imposed the EU retail leverage caps.
ESMA does not usually authorise firms itself. National authorities such as bafin in Germany or cysec in Cyprus do that, and ESMA works to make their supervision consistent by writing binding technical standards, issuing guidelines, and running peer reviews.
Its best known retail action capped contract-for-difference leverage across the EU at 30:1 on major currency pairs down to 2:1 on crypto, required margin close-out at 50% of initial margin, mandated negative balance protection, and banned trading bonuses. Member states adopted those measures permanently.
ESMA also maintains registers used across the bloc, supervises credit rating agencies and trade repositories directly, and publishes the data underpinning mifid-ii transparency rules.
Original diagrams for the ideas on this page. Illustrative, not real market data.
Margin and leverage. A $5,000 deposit can control a $100,000 position, which is 20:1 leverage. Because the loss is measured on the full $100,000, a 2.5% move against you halves the deposit and brings a margin call, and a 5% move uses all of it.
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