Global Forex Margin Trading Market and User Research 2026

Why this paper exists

Anyone trying to size the retail forex industry runs into the same problem. The market itself is measured well, because the Bank for International Settlements has surveyed it every three years since 1986, but the retail margin segment inside it is not measured by anyone in a consistent way. Brokers publish what suits them, regulators publish what they are obliged to, and the trade press fills the gaps with estimates that get repeated until they look like facts.

This paper does not add a new estimate to that pile. It gathers the figures that are actually public, says who published each one and when, and is explicit about what each figure does and does not cover. Where two sources disagree, both are given. Where a number is an estimate rather than a measurement, it is called an estimate. The aim is a reference a reader can check, not a headline.

The market the retail segment sits inside

The Bank for International Settlements' Triennial Central Bank Survey is the authoritative measure of foreign exchange activity. Its 2022 survey put average daily turnover at 7.5 trillion US dollars in April 2022. The 2025 survey, whose preliminary results were published in the second half of 2025, reported a rise to roughly 9.6 trillion US dollars a day in April 2025. Those figures cover every counterparty type: banks dealing with each other, banks dealing with funds and corporates, and the dealers that serve retail brokers.

The composition matters more than the total for anyone thinking about retail. Foreign exchange swaps are the largest instrument, at roughly half of turnover, and are an interbank funding tool with no retail equivalent. Spot transactions are around a third of the total. Outright forwards and options make up the rest. Retail margin trading is, in economic terms, a spot business: a contract for difference or a rolling spot forex position tracks the spot rate and is rolled daily, which is why the swap charge exists.

The survey also confirms how concentrated the market is. The United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan together account for well over three quarters of turnover by location of the sales desk, and the US dollar is on one side of close to nine in every ten trades. The most traded pair by a wide margin is EUR/USD, followed by USD/JPY and GBP/USD, which is exactly the order in which retail brokers quote their tightest spreads.

How big the retail margin segment is

There is no official measure of retail margin trading volume, and the BIS survey does not separate it out. The best that can be done is to triangulate from three kinds of public source: the survey's own counterparty breakdown, the disclosures of listed brokers, and the estimates of specialist industry analysts.

The survey's counterparty categories include a line for other financial institutions, which is where retail aggregators sit alongside hedge funds and proprietary trading firms, and the BIS has in past commentary treated retail-driven flow as a few percent of spot. Industry analysts have for a decade put retail margin trading somewhere between three and six percent of spot volume, which on the 2025 figures would be in the region of one hundred to two hundred billion US dollars a day of notional volume. That range should be treated as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement.

Listed brokers give a firmer footing on the revenue side. IG Group, CMC Markets, Plus500, Swissquote, Saxo Bank (which publishes annual accounts), XTB, Monex Group (which owns TradeStation and Japan's Monex Securities), GMO Financial Holdings and Interactive Brokers all publish audited figures. Between them the listed retail-facing CFD and forex brokers reported revenues in the low billions of US dollars a year in their most recent full-year reports, and each of the larger ones reports active client numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Plus500 and XTB, for example, have each reported active client counts in the range of several hundred thousand to around a million, and IG Group reports around 350,000 active clients. Adding the privately held brokers that disclose client numbers in regulatory filings or press releases, such as Exness, which has published monthly trading volumes above four trillion US dollars, suggests an active global client base that comfortably exceeds ten million accounts, with the caveat that one person often holds accounts at several brokers.

Where the traders are

Regional demand follows regulation, disposable income and the availability of local payment rails, and it has moved. Japan was for years the single largest retail market, with a retail forex volume that the Financial Futures Association of Japan has published monthly and that has at times exceeded the retail volume of the rest of the world combined. Japanese retail trading is domestic, conducted through locally licensed brokers under a 1:25 leverage cap that has applied since 2011.

Europe and the United Kingdom were the largest markets for internationally marketed CFD brokers until the European Securities and Markets Authority's product intervention measures in 2018 capped retail leverage at 1:30 on major pairs, banned bonuses and required standardised risk warnings. Client numbers in those markets stopped growing and broker revenue per client fell, which is the reason so many European-headquartered brokers built entities in the Seychelles, Mauritius, Vanuatu, Belize, South Africa and the Bahamas from 2018 onwards.

Australia followed with ASIC's product intervention order in March 2021, which applied the same 1:30 cap and pushed several Australian brokers to move international clients to offshore entities. The United States has a small retail forex market because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the National Futures Association limit leverage to 1:50 on majors, ban hedging in the same account, require a first-in-first-out treatment of positions and impose capital requirements that have left only a handful of retail forex dealers registered.

The growth since 2018 has come from outside those caps. Brokers' own disclosures and the language and payment methods they support point to South East Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines), South Asia (India, where onshore forex trading is restricted to exchange-traded contracts, Pakistan and Bangladesh), the Middle East (the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt), Africa (Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, the latter two with their own licensing regimes) and Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile). Exness, XM, FBS, OctaFX, HFM and Tickmill have each described one or more of these regions as their largest by client numbers in interviews and press releases. Finance Magnates' quarterly intelligence reports and the trade press coverage of broker expansion consistently name the same markets.

Who the traders are

The most reliable demographic data comes from regulators and from brokers' own surveys, and both tell a consistent story. The UK Financial Conduct Authority's research into CFD clients ahead of its 2018 and 2019 measures found a client base that was overwhelmingly male, skewed towards the 25 to 44 age band, and had often been trading for less than a year. ASIC's 2019 review of CFD providers and its 2020 consultation found the same profile in Australia and reported that a large majority of retail CFD clients lost money, with an aggregate net loss across the clients of the providers it examined.

The standardised risk warning that ESMA required from 2018 turned this into a published series. Every CFD provider serving European retail clients has to state the percentage of its retail accounts that lost money over the preceding twelve months. The figures published by the large brokers have consistently sat between roughly 65 and 82 percent, with the median around 72 to 76 percent. That number has been remarkably stable through the retail boom of 2020 and 2021 and the quieter years after it.

Brokers' own surveys, the popularity of mobile apps in their disclosures, and the app store rankings that trade publications track all point to the smartphone as the primary trading device for the retail client base outside Japan. The typical first deposit at the brokers that target emerging markets is small, often under 200 US dollars, and the minimum deposits of 5 to 10 dollars that several of them advertise are designed for exactly that market. Account longevity is short: regulators and broker filings have both described a large share of accounts as dormant within a year of opening.

How the industry is regulated

Retail margin trading is regulated nationally, and the rules differ enough that the same broker offers different products in different countries. The measures that shaped the current market are worth listing together, because their dates explain the geography of the industry.

• Japan: leverage capped at 1:25 for retail clients from August 2011, after a two-stage reduction from an uncapped market. Brokers must be licensed by the Financial Services Agency and belong to the Financial Futures Association of Japan.
• United States: leverage capped at 1:50 on major pairs and 1:20 on others from 2010 under CFTC rules, with NFA membership, a 20 million dollar net capital requirement for retail forex dealers and the first-in-first-out rule.
• European Union: ESMA's product intervention measures from August 2018, later adopted into national law by each member regulator, capped retail leverage at 1:30 on major pairs, 1:20 on non-majors, gold and major indices, 1:10 on commodities and minor indices, 1:5 on shares and 1:2 on cryptocurrencies, and required negative balance protection, a margin close-out at 50 percent and the standardised risk warning.
• United Kingdom: the FCA adopted the ESMA measures permanently in 2019 and extended them to CFD-like options; the ban on retail crypto derivatives followed in January 2021.
• Australia: ASIC's product intervention order took effect in March 2021 with the same leverage ladder as Europe, negative balance protection and a close-out rule, and was extended in 2022 until 2027.
• Cyprus: CySEC applies the ESMA measures and has additionally set out how Cypriot investment firms may and may not serve clients through offshore group entities.
• South Africa: the Financial Sector Conduct Authority licenses over-the-counter derivative providers under a regime introduced in 2018, with no leverage cap but conduct and capital rules.
• Kenya: the Capital Markets Authority has licensed online forex brokers since 2017 under its own regulations, one of the few African regulators to do so.
• Offshore centres: the Seychelles, Mauritius, Vanuatu, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (which explicitly does not regulate forex) and the Marshall Islands host the entities through which most internationally marketed brokers serve clients outside the capped jurisdictions, with leverage of 1:500 to 1:2000 and, in several cases, no negative balance protection requirement.

The practical result is that a broker group serving a global client base typically operates three to six regulated entities. A client in Germany is onboarded to the Cypriot or German entity at 1:30. A client in Malaysia is onboarded to the Seychelles or Mauritius entity at 1:1000 or higher. The brand, the platform and the pricing look the same. The legal counterparty, the leverage, the protections and the recourse if something goes wrong are different, which is why this site's research identifies the entity behind each licence.

How the money is made

A retail forex broker has four revenue lines, and the mix between them is the single most useful thing to understand about the business.

The first is the spread, the difference between the bid and ask price the broker shows. On a standard account the spread is the whole cost and the broker keeps the difference between its own quote and the price at which it hedges. The second is commission, charged per lot on raw-spread accounts where the spread shown is close to the interbank spread. The third is the swap, the overnight financing charge, where a broker's markup over the interbank interest differential is a steady income line that clients rarely examine. The fourth is trading revenue from positions the broker does not hedge, the so-called B-book, where the broker is the counterparty to the client's trade and earns what the client loses.

Listed brokers disclose enough to see the mix. Plus500 has described a model in which the large majority of client flow is internalised and hedged only at the portfolio level. IG Group and CMC Markets describe risk management that internalises client flow but hedges net exposure beyond set limits. Brokers marketing themselves as ECN or STP describe passing all client flow to liquidity providers and earning only commission and a small markup, although the term is used loosely and few brokers publish the audited execution statistics that would prove it. The industry's own trade press has for years estimated that a majority of retail brokers run a hybrid model, routing clients whose trading is likely to be profitable to liquidity providers and keeping the rest.

Costs are dominated by client acquisition. Brokers' filings show marketing and partner commissions as the largest expense after staff, and the shift from search advertising, which ESMA's measures and the platforms' own advertising policies made harder, to affiliates and introducing brokers is visible in the size of the partner programmes every large broker now runs. Revenue-share arrangements paying partners a share of spread or commission for the life of the client have become the standard offer, alongside cost-per-acquisition payments that in some markets exceed a thousand dollars per funded client.

What changed in the last three years

Three developments stand out from the public record since 2023. The first is the rise of proprietary trading firms selling funded-account challenges, which compete with brokers for the same traders and are examined in a separate paper in this series. The second is the growing use of copy trading and social features as an acquisition channel, with MetaQuotes' signals marketplace, cTrader Copy and broker-owned platforms such as those from eToro, ZuluTrade and Pepperstone's copy trading reaching a scale that regulators in Europe and Australia have started to examine. The third is the arrival of regulated retail event contracts and prediction markets in the United States, also examined separately, which brokers have watched closely as a possible new product line.

On the regulatory side the direction has been steady rather than dramatic. ASIC extended its product intervention order to 2027. CySEC issued guidance on Cypriot firms' relationships with offshore group entities and with prop firms. The FCA's Consumer Duty applied from July 2023 and required firms to evidence that products deliver fair value, which has led to a wave of pricing reviews. The BIS 2025 survey confirmed that electronic and algorithmic execution continues to grow as a share of spot, which is the environment retail flow is priced in.

How to read the figures in this paper

Turnover figures from the BIS are measured, net of local and cross-border double counting, and are the closest thing the industry has to a fact. Retail volume shares are estimates, published by analysts and repeated by the press, and should be read as a range. Client numbers from listed brokers are audited but count accounts rather than people, and brokers define active differently. Loss percentages from EU and UK risk warnings are measured and audited but cover only retail accounts at the disclosing entity over the prior twelve months, and say nothing about the offshore entities of the same groups.

88 Forex Brokers will revise this paper as new public data is released, in particular the final results of the 2025 BIS survey and the full-year reports of the listed brokers. Corrections and sources are welcome through the research contact form.

Sources

• Bank for International Settlements, Triennial Central Bank Survey of foreign exchange and OTC derivatives markets, 2022 and 2025 editions
• European Securities and Markets Authority, product intervention measures on CFDs and binary options, 2018 to 2019, and the related national measures
• UK Financial Conduct Authority, policy statement PS19/18 on CFDs and CFD-like options, and the Consumer Duty
• Australian Securities and Investments Commission, product intervention order on CFDs, 2021, and its 2022 extension
• US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and National Futures Association rules on retail foreign exchange dealers
• Japan Financial Services Agency and Financial Futures Association of Japan, retail forex margin trading statistics
• Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission circulars on the provision of services through third-country entities
• Annual reports and results presentations of IG Group, CMC Markets, Plus500, XTB, Swissquote, Saxo Bank, Monex Group, GMO Financial Holdings and Interactive Brokers
• Company disclosures and press releases of Exness, XM, FBS, OctaFX, HFM, Tickmill and Pepperstone
• Finance Magnates Intelligence quarterly reports and the trade press coverage of broker results and expansion

This paper consolidates publicly available information as at its publication date. It is research and commentary, not investment advice, and is revised when the sources it draws on are updated. Corrections are welcome through the contact form.