Alpari UK: what happens when your broker goes bust?

Alpari UK is the first big forex broker to fall victim to the Swiss National Bank's shock decision. John Stepek looks at what it means for Alpari's customers.

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Alpari's collapse leaves West Ham without a sponsor

The Swiss National Bank's surprise decision to stop effectively pegging its currency to 1.20 against the euro (after three years of doing so) has claimed its first major scalp foreign exchange broker (and West Ham sponsor) Alpari UK.

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John Stepek
John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.

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