The global retail trading and brokerage sector is quietly undergoing a fundamental restructuring of its business model. Amid intensifying competition for users, major institutions are no longer relying solely on single product categories to attract capital. Instead, they have clearly segmented their operations into two parallel tracks: front-end customer acquisition and back-end revenue generation. At the entry point, low-barrier, highly topical innovations such as spot equities, event prediction contracts, and tokenized assets are widely used as onboarding tools for newcomers. On the profit side, established instruments like contract-for-difference (CFD) accounts, options, and other derivatives—backed by mature pricing mechanisms and consistent monetization capabilities—continue to form the core revenue base. This strategy of paving the way at the front end while monetizing at the back end has already been validated by the financial performance of several leading firms.
Take European broker XTB as an example. Its data on new account opening reveals a distinct preference for lower-risk assets among fresh clients. In the first half of this year across the EU, nearly 40% of new users allocated their initial deposits to equities, while more than a quarter chose ETFs or term deposit plans. Leveraged CFDs accounted for only about 17%. Yet the revenue structure tells a starkly different story. In H1, CFDs contributed virtually all of the company’s gross profit from financial instruments, representing over 95% of the total. This indicates that while the firm successfully attracted over 700,000 new clients through conventional investment products, its actual profit engine remains firmly rooted in traditional leveraged trading.
Capital consolidation efforts in North America further amplify this trend. IG Group recently announced a multi-billion-dollar acquisition of the Underdog platform, primarily to bridge the gap between entertainment-driven prediction markets and formal financial trading. The strategy aims to allow users to establish trading habits through contracts tied to sports events and macroeconomic indicators, before gradually migrating them to more complex financial derivatives via IG’s broader trading ecosystem. Industry analysts suggest that if the deal closes as planned, it could potentially double the company’s regional revenue and drive a significant surge in active user bases. Although the model is still in an integration phase, its capacity to absorb traffic during rapid expansion is already becoming apparent.
Quarterly results from retail trading giant Robinhood also reflect this transitional rhythm between legacy and emerging businesses. During the second quarter, event-driven prediction contract trading volume and revenue surged more than tenfold, pushing quarterly earnings past $150 million and marking the first time these figures surpassed both cryptocurrency and traditional equity segments. However, when looking at the broader revenue picture, options trading still led the pack with $340 million in income. This underscores a clear reality: while novel interactive products can rapidly aggregate traffic and spike trading frequency in the short term, it is the time-tested options architecture that ultimately underpins the platform’s profit margins.
Digital asset exchanges are following a similar underlying logic. By introducing tokenized equities, Binance has effectively lowered the cognitive barrier for crypto holders entering traditional financial markets. Platform data shows that nearly half of these users are trading U.S. stocks for the first time, while others tend to blend spot trading, perpetual futures, and equity positions. Meanwhile, Coinbase has pursued a more systematic, full-category integration approach, using zero-commission stock trading as a traffic funnel to seamlessly connect digital assets, traditional equities, and event prediction markets within a single clearing infrastructure. An analysis of these operators’ trajectories reveals that while the industry has not yet settled on a standardized user-acquisition blueprint, the commercial essence remains unchanged. Leveraging lightweight, fragmented new products to educate users and onboard assets, then relying on high-stickiness, high-value traditional trading systems to cement profitability, has emerged as the standard playbook for maintaining long-term competitive advantage.
