Individual investors tend to get liquidated, but for hedge funds larger investors the story is more complex. See <
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-29/archeg...>:
> In the traditional financial system, very few things work like this. One thing that mostly does is a margin account at a retail stock brokerage: If your stock declines, you will get a margin call, and if you don’t post margin within a defined and fairly tight time frame your broker will sell the stock, and this really might all be done by a computer in a pretty formulaic way. But if you have a big enough account — if you are a big hedge fund or family office — it doesn’t work that way. When Credit Suisse Group AG decided that Archegos Capital Management did not have enough collateral in its margin account, a Credit Suisse representative called Archegos and asked it to post more collateral, and Archegos said, sorry, we are really busy this week, let’s discuss next week. In theory Credit Suisse could have liquidated Archegos’s positions, but in practice that would have been rude, so it didn’t. Credit Suisse did not extend credit to Archegos based on some defined formulaic function of the value of its collateral; Credit Suisse extended credit to Archegos based on some fuzzy holistic relationship-based function of how much business it hoped to do with Archegos, how much the Credit Suisse people liked the Archegos people, how its traders felt about the collateral, when its risk committees had meetings, stuff like that.