[vkou]

People who were only storing money in the exchange for the short term (To conduct trades) got robbed too.

When I open a trading account on a stock exchange, it's not longer my money. I've loaned it.

I do have more confidence that its owners won't be arrested for money laundering, followed by all my funds dissapearing to a Bahaman slush fund, though.

In another thread (About the SEC regulating ICOs), there were a number of people encouraging investment into and downplaying the risk of unregulated, opaque financial securities ran by persons not based in the US. Rail against the SEC all you want, but events like this are why it exists. Fraud erodes trust in the market.

[paulsutter]

The brokerage only owns the stocks in your account if you enable margin on the account (you dont even need to use margin, if you enable margin they own what's in the account and if they go bankrupt your account is gone too).

If you keep margin disabled, you'll eventually get it all back even if the brokerage goes bankrupt.

During the financial crisis, I asked a broker to disable margin on my account (never used it anyway). It took weeks before that happened. Some "technical holdup" that they assured me had nothing to do with loaning or pledging the contents of my account.