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The mission of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission or Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM) is to protect investors and that is achieved by supervising and regulating the capital and all other financial instruments markets, as well as the participants on those markets, including all forex and CFD brokers.
The Commission was established back in 1991 as an independent public institution, with administrative and financial autonomy – CMVM income comes solely from supervision fees and fines, and not from the the budget of the Portuguese government.
CMVM monitors all securities issuers, financial intermediaries, independent investment advisers, markets, settlement and centralized systems managing entities and the entities whose object is the clearing of operations on commodities in derivatives markets, institutional investors, investment funds, holders of qualifying holdings in public companies, sinking funds, investment compensation schemes and respective managing entities, auditors and risk rating companies, risk capital companies and funds, securitization companies and funds and also the managing companies of said funds and all other individuals, who pursue, professionally or not, activities related with securities.
In general CMVM regulates the functioning of the securities markets, as well as all public offerings, while cooperating with other national authorities with responsibilities in the supervision and regulation of the financial system such as Banco de Portugal-BdP (the central bank) and the Portuguese Insurance Institute(ISP).
The CMVM is a part of the International Organisation of Securities Commissions(IOSCO), the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the Ibero-American Securities Institute (IIMV).
As a EU member Portugal complies with all regulations introduced by ESMA, which include specifically for all forex and CFD brokers the rule to cap the maximum leverage with all forex transactions at 30:1, to provide a negative balance protection to all traders, to keep their money in segregated accounts, to file regular reports, to allow external audits, to maintain a minimum operational capital of at least 730 000 EUR and to ensuring a minimum level of compensation per investor of 20 000 EUR by participating in a Investor Compensation Scheme (ICV), which is backed by CMVM.
Compliance with those rules allows all forex and CFD brokers, licensed by the CMVM to operate freely in any other European Union country.
All major credit or debit cards like VISA and MasterCard are widely accepted in Portugal. Other methods include e-wallets like Neteller, Skrill and Multibanco. However, nearly 70% of all electronic payments for the past year have been with credit or debit cards.