I know that stops are not guaranteed. If the market makes a major move against you and the stop cannot be honored, you can loose your account. But, how often is a true margin call? Meaning, the broker has liquidated your account and still wants more money from you to cover the move against you. Ever happen? Rare? All the time?

If it does happen, what means do they use to enforce it? If you say too bad, you ain't paying, what do they do?

When your open trades are making losses to the point that it is wiping half of your account, the broker has the right to close all trades, and they usually do.

This way, they will not find themselves in the position to ask money from you if your account becomes negative because they will stop all trades before that happen.

Ah, okay, so that effectively eliminates the risk of a margin call.

That is a margin call. It mitigates the risk of owing more than you have in the account.

That might be what is called a "margin call" in forex, but its not what I'd call a margin call. A margin call to my understanding is when your broker calls you up and asks for more money as you've lost more than the money in your account. This happens in commodities.

what you're referring to is 'overloss' - not with retail online fx trading
ecns' ?

check with individual broker what % of account margin
they use when initiating 'close trades'

I thought I saw an excellent margin explanation somewhere on this forum.

A friend of mine has asked me to explain it to him.

With numbers like "margin 4000%" it can get a little confusing to newbies.

Although I think I know it .. do you think words would come out of my mouth ?

My understanding is that if you have an account of $10000 at 100:1 Leverage and position is $1000 then if you put one trade on your available margin is $9000 or 900%.

If you to below an arbitrary amount set by your broker ( 50% in the case of IFBX) then your position is closed out.

Would love to find that thread .. it explained it properly !