Broker won't let me withdraw or closed my positions: what to claim

The case, in five lines

What is brought

Action for performance of the contract requiring the broker to return the withheld balance and restore the cancelled profits, with compensation for the loss caused by the wrongful close-out or by execution at an off-market price (articles 1101 and 1124 of the Civil Code), combined with a claim for a declaration that the terms allowing it to cancel trades or withhold funds at its discretion are void (articles 82 and 83 of the TRLGDCU, the Spanish consumer protection act).

Before which court

The civil section of the Tribunal de Instancia (the first-instance court). If the broker is in another EU Member State and directed its business to Spain, you, as a consumer, may sue it in the court for the place where you are domiciled (articles 17 and 18 of the Brussels I bis Regulation), whatever the contract says. Appeals go to the Audiencia Provincial (the provincial appeal court). Before suing, you must make a written claim to the broker, which is how a consumer meets the pre-action requirement (seventh additional provision of Organic Law 1/2025).

Deadline

A five-year limitation period to claim the balance or compensation (article 1964.2 of the Civil Code), from the day the broker closed your positions or from when you could demand the return of the balance; an out-of-court claim interrupts it (article 1973 of the Civil Code). The nullity of an unfair term is not subject to any time limit. If the contract is governed by the law of another State, that law determines the limitation period. And the deadline that really bites is a different one: the broker is only required to keep the recordings and communications about your orders for five years (article 16.7 of MiFID II).

Who can bring it

You, as account holder and retail client, against the investment firm you contracted with: the company named in the contract and on the statements, which is not always the trading brand or the group entity that signed you up. If it is an unauthorised entity, suing it achieves nothing: the fraud is reported and the liability of the bank that executed your transfers is examined.

Financial risk

If the claim is dismissed in full, you are ordered to pay the broker's costs, unless the court finds serious doubts of fact or law (article 394.1 LEC, the Civil Procedure Act), with recoverable fees capped at one third of the amount in dispute (article 394.3 LEC). The expert report on prices is the main expense of the case. And a judgment against an unauthorised entity with no assets in the EU cannot be collected: that is why the first step is to find out who you contracted with.

The first question is not the price: it is who you contracted with

Open the contract and the statements and look for the name of the company, its licence number and the supervisor that granted it. Many CFD brands operate through two entities: one authorised in an EU Member State, usually Cyprus, and another in an offshore jurisdiction without EU protections. Clients are often moved from the first to the second with a single click, with the offer of higher leverage or a bonus, and many only discover the switch once the problem has already arisen. The entity that matters is the one shown on your statements on the day of the close-out or the withdrawal.

If the entity is not authorised to operate in Spain, or appears on the warnings list of the CNMV (Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores, the Spanish securities regulator), the civil route against it leads to a judgment that nobody will pay. The right course is to report the fraud (we draft the complaint) and to look into the liability of the bank that executed your transfers. And one warning holds in every case: if, to “unlock” the withdrawal, you are asked to pay a tax, a release fee or a guarantee deposit, you are not facing a block but the second stage of the fraud.

If it is an investment firm authorised in the EU, the picture changes completely: you are dealing with a supervised counterparty that is required to keep records of all its services and transactions (article 16.6 of Directive 2014/65/EU, known as MiFID II). Article 16.9 also requires it to safeguard its clients' funds and prevent their use for its own account, so your balance is not the broker's money but client money that the broker holds on your behalf. From there, the only question is whether the close-out or the block had a basis in the contract and in the rules.

The 50% margin close-out is mandatory: the case lies in the circumstances

Since 1 August 2019, the CNMV Resolution of 27 June 2019 has required every provider marketing CFDs to retail clients resident in Spain, wherever it is based, to close positions when the sum of the funds in the account and the net unrealised profits on all open CFDs falls below 50% of the total initial margin. It is measured per account, not per position. The same resolution provides negative balance protection, so a retail client cannot lose more than the money in the account, and it does not require the broker to warn you beforehand: the margin call many brokers send is a courtesy under the contract, not an obligation under the rules.

That is why “they closed me out without warning” is not, on its own, a case. The case arises in four situations: the close-out was executed while the margin level was still above the close-out threshold set in your contract (the rules require a close-out at 50% at the latest); the price used to calculate that level was not a market price but a spike that appeared only in the broker's own price feed; the broker tightened its margin requirements or cut leverage without notice, just before a data release or a weekend; or it let the account go negative and now claims the shortfall from you, something it cannot demand from a retail client.

The trap almost nobody sees is professional client status. These protections only cover retail clients, which in law means every client who is not a professional (article 193 of Law 6/2023 on Securities Markets and Investment Services), and some brokers offer to opt you up to elective professional status through a two-minute form in exchange for higher leverage. Annex II of MiFID II only allows it if at least two of three requirements are met: an average of ten transactions of significant size per quarter over the previous four quarters, a portfolio of cash deposits and financial instruments exceeding 500,000 euros, or a year of professional experience in the financial sector, and it also requires the firm to genuinely assess your competence. If you did not meet them, the reclassification can be challenged and you regain retail client protection.

Slippage, requotes and off-market prices: what the broker has to prove

Executing your order is not enough for the broker: it must take all sufficient steps to obtain the best possible result, taking into account price, costs, speed and likelihood of execution (article 218.1.a of Law 6/2023), and for a retail client that result is measured in terms of total consideration (article 222.2). In CFDs the broker usually acts as your counterparty and makes the price it quotes you; that is why article 64.4 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/565, which applies directly throughout the Union, requires it, for over-the-counter products, to check the fairness of the price it proposes by gathering the market data used to estimate it and comparing it with similar products. A CFD on gold has to track gold.

It helps to separate what is legitimate from what is not. An ordinary stop-loss is an order to close at the next available price once the level is hit, and when the market gaps, after a weekend or a central bank decision, it may be filled at a considerably worse price without that being a breach; only a guaranteed stop secures the exact level. What is not legitimate is slippage that only ever goes against the client, a spike that appears in the broker's quotes but not in the underlying market or at other providers, a requote that only arrives when the price moves in your favour, or a delay incompatible with executing orders sequentially and promptly (article 67.1 of the same Regulation). Asymmetry is the tell-tale sign.

The tool to prove it is in the law itself: the firm must be able to demonstrate to you, at your request, that it executed your orders in accordance with its execution policy (article 220.3 of Law 6/2023, which reflects a rule common to the whole EU). That request is made in writing, identifying each order by its number, time and price, and a generic answer does not satisfy it. If the problem was that the platform froze, article 16.4 of MiFID II requires the broker to take reasonable steps, using appropriate and proportionate systems, to ensure the continuity and regularity of its service, and article 67.1 of the Delegated Regulation requires it to inform retail clients of any material difficulty in executing their orders as soon as it becomes aware of it.

Blocked withdrawals: compliance reviews, bonuses and accusations of abuse

The broker is an obliged entity under anti-money laundering rules and may ask you for the source of your funds. Article 7.3 of Law 10/2010 allows it to refuse to execute transactions and to end the relationship if it cannot apply due diligence, and exempts it from liability for doing so unless there is unjust enrichment: it may close your account, but it may not keep your money. When it is a bank that imposes this kind of block, there is a separate guide; with a broker, what matters is to answer once and completely, in writing and with proof of receipt, because every partial answer gives it another excuse, and to accept that the money will be returned the same way it came in, which is what almost every contract requires.

Bonuses deserve special attention. The same 2019 CNMV Resolution prohibits offering retail clients payments or benefits, monetary or otherwise, linked to the marketing of CFDs, and the Resolution of 11 July 2023 also banned advertising these products to retail clients in Spain. If a broker gave you a bonus and now makes withdrawal of your own money conditional on trading a set volume of lots, the bonus is already a breach, or the sign that you contracted with the group's non-European entity. And the term holding back your deposits until that volume is reached makes the contract depend on the broker's will and limits your rights as a consumer: two of the categories that article 82.4 of the TRLGDCU, developed in its articles 85 to 90, declares unfair in every case.

The accusation of “abusive trading”, “arbitrage” or “latency abuse” usually rests on a term allowing the broker to cancel trades and profits at its sole discretion. That term leaves performance of the contract to the discretion of one party, and if it refers to a policy you were not given when you signed up, it never became part of the contract (article 80.1.a of the TRLGDCU). That said, the case is not won by denying the obvious: if you used software to exploit latency in the broker's price feed, or closed at a manifestly erroneous price, a clear term correcting such trades in both directions may pass the fairness test. What the broker cannot do is retrospectively cancel profits from ordinary trading: the specific breach has to be proved by the broker, and a term shifting that burden onto you is also unfair (article 82.4 of the TRLGDCU).

Where to sue and what has to be done first

Most of these brokers are in Cyprus or another EU Member State, and their terms and conditions refer disputes to their own courts. That clause does not bind you. If the broker pursues its business in Spain or directs it to Spain by any means, such as a Spanish-language website, an account manager who calls you in Spanish or advertising here, you may sue it in the court for the place where you are domiciled, and it may only sue you in Spain (articles 17 and 18 of the Brussels I bis Regulation). Against a consumer, the Regulation only upholds jurisdiction agreements entered into after the dispute has arisen or that give the consumer more options. And the Spanish judgment is then enforced in Cyprus without any prior recognition procedure.

In 2019 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled, in the case of a Czech investor trading forex with a Cypriot broker, that someone who trades in this way on their own account is a consumer for these purposes. The volume of their trades, the risk taken, their knowledge or their active trading are, in principle, irrelevant, and their classification as a retail client is not decisive on its own either. You would lose the right to sue at home if you traded as part of your professional activity, for example through your company. And even if the contract chooses the law of another State, the review of unfair terms does not disappear: it derives from a European directive that every Member State applies, and the court must carry it out even of its own motion.

Article 5 of Organic Law 1/2025 makes the admission of a declaratory claim conditional on a prior attempt at an appropriate dispute resolution method concerning the same subject later brought to court; it is not needed to enforce the judgment. For consumers, the seventh additional provision simplifies this: a prior claim to the broker that goes unanswered within the time allowed, or receives an unsatisfactory answer, is enough, and so is the decision on a complaint to the CNMV, which accepts it once a month has passed without a reply, decides within a maximum of ninety calendar days and is not binding. Against a broker in another Member State, the CNMV's complaints service refers you to the equivalent body in that country through the European FIN-NET network. If you traded through your company, you are not a consumer and a prior claim to the broker is not enough; the CNMV decision might serve, because the law refers to users of financial services, but the prudent course is also to try one of the general methods, such as mediation or a confidential binding offer.

What to claim, how to quantify it and what happens if the broker goes bust

Faced with a breach, article 1124 of the Civil Code lets you choose between demanding performance and terminating the contract, with compensation for damages and payment of interest in either case, and article 1101 requires anyone who fails to perform, or in any way contravenes the terms of their obligation, to pay compensation. In practice you claim the return of the withheld balance with statutory interest from the date of the claim, the restoration of the cancelled profits and compensation for the wrongful close-out, together with a declaration that the terms the broker relied on are void: such terms are treated as never having been included, while the rest of the contract remains in force without them (article 83 of the TRLGDCU).

Quantifying the loss from the close-out is where many well-pleaded cases are lost. The court does not usually award the profit the position would have made had you held it for months, because that cannot be proved with certainty; it awards the difference between the execution you suffered and the one that should have taken place, or the cost of reopening the position as soon as you could. If the close-out was premature but the market kept moving against you, the loss may be much smaller than it seems; if it was at a price that never existed, it is the difference from the real price in that minute multiplied by the position size. An expert makes that calculation with data from the underlying market and from other providers, adjusting for the broker's server time, which rarely matches Spanish time.

If the problem is not a block but the broker's insolvency, the Fondo General de Garantía de Inversiones (FOGAIN, the Spanish investor compensation fund) comes into play: it covers the cash and securities that a member firm cannot return, up to 100,000 euros per investor (article 6 of Royal Decree 948/2001), once insolvency proceedings are opened or the CNMV declares that the firm cannot meet its obligations to its clients. For that declaration, the investor must have asked for the return of their funds without obtaining it within twenty-one working days (article 5). It does not cover trading losses or crypto-assets, and a broker from another Member State passporting its services into Spain from there is covered, where applicable, by its home country's scheme, with its own rules and limits. Your written withdrawal request is also the first step towards that guarantee.

How we run the case, step by step

1. 1

   We secure the evidence the same day

   We export the full account history, with every order number, its time to the second, the price and the margin level; we save the platform's journal if you use the desktop version, and we download the terms, the execution policy and the bonus rules in the version in force that day. If the broker closes the account, you lose that access.

2. 2

   We identify the entity and its authorisation

   We check which company appears on your statements, whether it is authorised in the EU and entitled to operate in Spain according to the registers of the CNMV (the Spanish securities regulator), whether you were moved to the group's non-European entity and whether you were reclassified as a professional client. That determines whom to sue and whether the civil route is the right one.

3. 3

   We make a written claim and request the data

   We send the customer service department a claim that lists each disputed order and the exact amount and demands the return of the balance, and we request proof that execution followed its policy (article 220.3 of Law 6/2023) and the recordings and communications relating to your orders (article 16.7 of MiFID II). This meets the pre-action requirement and interrupts the limitation period.

4. 4

   We commission the expert report on prices

   An expert compares the broker's quotes with the underlying market and with other providers in the same minute, recalculates the margin level at the moment of the close-out and quantifies the loss. This is the evidence that decides whether there was an off-market price or a premature close-out.

5. 5

   We assess the regulator route

   After a month without an answer, or with an unsatisfactory one, we decide whether to complain to the CNMV or, if the broker is from another Member State, to the out-of-court body in its home country through FIN-NET. The resulting report does not bind the broker, but it establishes facts and sometimes unlocks the refund without litigation.

6. 6

   We sue in your home court

   We file the claim in the civil section of the Tribunal de Instancia (the first-instance court) for the place where you are domiciled, with the action for performance, compensation and the nullity of the terms, and we ask the court to order the broker to produce its server records and its quotes for that minute: only it holds them, and the rule on ease of access to evidence weighs against it if it does not produce them.

The law that applies

• Arts. 218, 220 y 222 Ley 6/2023. They require whoever executes client orders to take all sufficient steps to obtain the best possible result, taking into account price, costs, speed and likelihood of execution and settlement; to be able to demonstrate to the client, at the client's request, that its orders were executed in accordance with the execution policy; and, for a retail client who gave no specific instructions, to measure that result in terms of total consideration. BOE-A-2023-7053
• Arts. 64.4 y 67.1 Reglamento Delegado (UE) 2017/565. When executing orders or dealing in over-the-counter products, the firm must check the fairness of the price proposed to the client by gathering the market data used to estimate it and comparing it, as far as possible, with similar products; it must execute comparable orders sequentially and promptly and inform retail clients of any material difficulty relevant to their proper execution as soon as it becomes aware of it. 32017R0565
• Art. 16 Directiva 2014/65/UE (MiFID II). It requires an investment firm to take reasonable steps, using appropriate and proportionate systems, to ensure the continuity and regularity of its service, and to have a record of all its services and transactions, including recordings of conversations and electronic communications relating to client orders, to be made available to the client on request and kept for five years, or up to seven where the supervisor so requests; and arrangements safeguarding client funds and preventing their use for the firm's own account. 32014L0065
• Arts. 80, 82 y 83 TRLGDCU. Terms that have not been individually negotiated must be clear and may not refer to documents not provided before or at the time of contracting. Terms that, contrary to good faith, cause a significant imbalance to the consumer's detriment are unfair, and in every case those that make the contract depend on the trader's will, limit the consumer's rights or improperly place the burden of proof on the consumer. They are void as of right and treated as not included. BOE-A-2007-20555
• Arts. 1101, 1124 y 1964.2 CC. Those who, in performing their obligations, are guilty of wilful misconduct, negligence or delay, or in any way contravene their terms, must compensate the damage caused; in reciprocal obligations, the injured party may demand performance or termination, with compensation for damages and payment of interest in either case; and personal actions with no special period are time-barred five years after performance of the obligation can be demanded. BOE-A-1889-4763
• Arts. 17 y 18 Reglamento (UE) 1215/2012 (Bruselas I bis). In contracts concluded by a consumer with someone who pursues activities in the State of the consumer's domicile or directs them there by any means, the consumer may sue before the court for the place of their domicile, regardless of the other party's domicile, and may only be sued before the courts of the State in which they are domiciled. 32012R1215
• Art. 7.3 Ley 10/2010. Obliged entities shall not establish business relationships or execute transactions where they cannot apply due diligence measures, and if that becomes impossible during the relationship they shall end it; that refusal or termination gives rise to no liability for them, unless there is unjust enrichment. BOE-A-2010-6737
• Disposición adicional séptima LO 1/2025. In individual actions brought by consumers, the pre-action requirement is met by a prior out-of-court claim to the business they contracted with that receives no answer within the period set by the special legislation, or an unsatisfactory one, and also by the decision on complaints lodged with the Banco de España (Spain's central bank), the CNMV or the Dirección General de Seguros y Fondos de Pensiones (the Spanish insurance and pension funds supervisor). BOE-A-2025-76

Each article checked against the consolidated text published in the BOE (the Spanish official gazette).

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