The retail FX and CFD sector's growth between Q4 2021 and Q4 2025 was measurable across every dimension. Monthly trading volume across 52 tracked brokers rose from $7.1 trillion to $19.5 trillion, a 173% increase over four years.
Active accounts doubled, from 2.35 million to 4.69 million. Yet the share of combined volume held by the five largest brokers moved by just 0.2 percentage points, from 38.4% to 38.2%, within the margin of rounding, according to FM Intelligence.
Access the Full FM Intelligence Report: Top 5 Retail CFD Brokers - Same Volume Share, New Names
Retail CFD Top Five Hold 38% Volume Share After Four Years
An FM Intelligence review of the five defining trends in CFD for 2025, published in December, found that three brokers had already crossed the $1 trillion monthly volume mark by Q3 of that year, a threshold that only IC Markets had consistently held in prior periods. That pre-announcement of the shift at the top of the rankings is now confirmed in the Q4 data.
Only IC Markets and IG Group retained their top-five positions across the full four years. Their volumes grew substantially, IC Markets from $913 billion to $1.76 trillion and IG Group from $749 billion to $1.56 trillion, but both lost individual market share as the broader sample expanded faster.
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The three brokers that joined them in Q4 2025, EC Markets at $1.49 trillion, TMGM at $1.39 trillion, and JustMarkets at $1.24 trillion, replaced Plus500, Saxo Bank, and GAIN Capital, each of which grew in absolute terms but was outpaced. TMGM's volume rose 578% from its Q4 2021 level of $205 billion.
FM Intelligence noted that EC Markets and JustMarkets were absent from the 2021 dataset, which limits direct comparison for both brokers.
XTB Builds a Client Base Larger Than the Entire 2021 Top Five
Volume concentration held flat. Client concentration did not. The top five brokers by active accounts raised their combined share from 31.5% to 36.7% across the four-year period, a 5.2 percentage point increase that FM Intelligence attributed almost entirely to XTB.
The Polish fintech's active account base grew from 127,000 in Q4 2021 to 850,000 in Q4 2025, a 569% increase, moving the broker from fifth place to first and giving it 18.1% of total tracked accounts. By Q4 2025, XTB alone held more accounts than the entire 2021 top five combined.
XTB added 864,000 clients in full-year 2025, a pace its chief executive described as unprecedented in the company's two-decade history. The broker's expansion into stock and ETF fractional investing across European markets accompanied the growth in its client count. The other four brokers in the Q4 2025 accounts top five, EC Markets, IC Markets, JustMarkets, and D Prime, each held between 4.2% and 4.9%.
Active CFD accounts across the industry exceeded 6 million by Q4 2025, defying the usual seasonal slowdown, FM Intelligence reported in February. A separate FM Intelligence analysis published the same month estimated that retail trading demand hit a record in early 2026, up 25% from the prior peak.
Average monthly volume per 1,000 active accounts across the 52-broker sample rose 38%, from $3.0 billion in Q4 2021 to $4.2 billion in Q4 2025, indicating that trading activity outpaced client growth. The ratio varied sharply across the top brokers: TMGM generated $11.7 billion per 1,000 accounts, IC Markets $7.8 billion, and XTB $0.6 billion, a gap FM Intelligence attributed to differences in client profile, product mix, and trading frequency.
