> The FCA rarely acts to protect UK citizens from potentially dangerous financial products from authorised regulations.

The job of the FCA, and of regulations in general, is not to shield people from risk and losses, it's to prevent scams and to make sure people are informed of the rules and of the risks.

Basically the law is not there to prevent people from making bad decisions, it's there to ensure that they can make informed decisions.

The whole reason that regulators had to step in was that companies absolutely were pushing these kind of complex, high-risk non-cryptocurrency financial products to ordinary consumers that didn't understand how they worked as a way to make money fast, through ads in mainstream places like YouTube.

Or on the front of football players shirts, in the form of sponsorships.

> The last time I'm aware of, to ensure that retail gamblers cannot lose more than they stake in highly leveraged bets, was pushed through by ESMA, not the FCA.

Same here in Germany. We don't have access to US-style stonk options, to the great frustration of people seeing US redditors making bank with GameStop while all we had was hodl'ing the stock itself.

> We don't have access to US-style stonk options

Could you clarify please? There are a number of brokers that give you access to US option markets in Germany, e.g. all the intermediaries for Interactive Brokers such as Lynx, Banx, etc. Relatively easy to set up, too.