IG Group, one of the larger EU brokers, issued an official statement – after Brexit the broker is asking all its EEA clients to transfer their accounts to IG Europe. This has been deemed necessary because the IG United Kingdom branch will not be serving the European Economic Area (EEA) traders anymore. Users will needed to verify their identities before January 8th. All accounts that did not do so were closed. More interestingly, all open positions were closed and then reopened once the user was officially transferred. The company reassured their clients that their profit (or loss for that matter) would not be affected. What an annoying hassle for their clients. I really hope they were right about the positions being unaffected, because if they weren’t it would be a hot mess.
Why would there be a need to open and close positions? When all IBKR Australian clients accounts were transferred to IBKR AUS from IBKR USA there was no such need? May be because IG Uk and IG Eu are OTC brokers and not representing exchange traded products!