Investor Complaints to Portugal's Market Regulator Jump 9.4%, With More Than a Third Upheld
The CMVM received 151 investor complaints in the first half of 2026, up 9.4% on a year earlier, and sided with the complainant in 37% of the 175 cases it closed. Order execution and shares drew the most grievances, most of them aimed at banks — with Caixa Geral de Depósitos and the broker XTB the tw
More small investors in Portugal are unhappy with how their orders are handled — and a growing minority are being proved right. The Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (Securities Market Commission, or CMVM), the regulator that oversees the country's stock and bond markets, received 151 complaints from investors in the first half of 2026, up 9.4% on the same period a year earlier and 13.5% higher than in the closing months of 2025.
Of the 175 cases the regulator closed over the period, it sided with the investor in 37% of them — more than a third — while finding no valid grounds in 58%. That is a meaningful strike rate for a supervisor that spends much of its time weighing technical disputes between clients and financial firms, and it suggests that a good share of the grievances reaching the CMVM are not merely misunderstandings.
What are people complaining about? The single biggest theme was order execution — how and when a buy or sell instruction is actually carried out — and the financial instrument that generated the most friction was shares. That points to the everyday mechanics of retail trading: an order that fills at an unexpected price, a delay, or a transaction the customer feels was mishandled. Complaints of this kind tend to spike when markets are volatile and small investors are trading more actively.
The bulk of the discontent was aimed at banks. Some 73% of complaints targeted credit institutions, with a further 14% directed at investment firms. Two names stood out in the caseload: Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Portugal's state-owned bank) drew 17 complaints, and the online broker XTB drew 16 — a reminder that low-cost trading platforms, which have pulled in large numbers of first-time investors, now feature prominently in the regulator's inbox alongside the traditional high-street banks.
One piece of good news for complainants is speed. The CMVM took a median of 57 days to resolve a case, some 23 days faster than in the second half of 2025 and 22 days quicker than a year before. The regulator has been under pressure to turn cases around more promptly, and the numbers suggest that effort is bearing fruit even as the volume of complaints climbs.
For the mechanics of actually filing, the humble Livro de Reclamações (Complaints Book) remains the channel of choice, accounting for 62% of submissions — most of them lodged through its electronic version rather than the paper booklet still found on the counter of every regulated business in Portugal.
The practical takeaway for anyone investing here — including the many foreign residents who open Portuguese brokerage or bank accounts — is that the CMVM does function as a genuine backstop when a trade goes wrong, and that pursuing a complaint is neither futile nor especially slow. Keep records of your orders and confirmations, use the electronic Complaints Book to escalate a dispute your bank or broker will not resolve, and be aware that, on the evidence of the past six months, better than a third of investors who press their case end up vindicated.
