XTB has started letting Polish clients decide exactly which shares or ETFs they sell, instead of pushing every disposal through the first-in, first-out method, or FIFO, that has long governed how the country's brokers calculate taxable gains.

The feature went live on May 29, and the company says it is the first brokerage in Poland to offer it.

The pitch is tax. By choosing the lot they sell, investors get a say in the size of the gain they realize, and therefore the bill they hand to the tax office.

How FIFO Inflates the Tax Bill

Poland taxes capital gains at a flat 19%, the levy known locally as “the Belka tax,” after Marek Belka, the finance minister who introduced it in 2002. When an investor buys the same stock in several tranches at different prices and later sells part of the holding, the cost basis assigned to that sale decides how large the taxable gain is.

Under FIFO, the earliest purchases are treated as sold first. On a position that has climbed over time, those are usually the cheapest shares, which maximizes the recorded gain and the tax due.

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XTB, like other domestic brokers, had been applying the rule automatically.

Polish law does let investors identify the actual purchase price of the shares they sell, so FIFO is a default rather than the only path. Brokers have stuck with it partly because exchange Exchange An exchange is known as a marketplace that supports the trading of derivatives, commodities, securities, and other financial instruments.Generally, an exchange is accessible through a digital platform or sometimes at a tangible address where investors organize to perform trading. Among the chief responsibilities of an exchange would be to uphold honest and fair-trading practices. These are instrumental in making sure that the distribution of supported security rates on that exchange are effectiv An exchange is known as a marketplace that supports the trading of derivatives, commodities, securities, and other financial instruments.Generally, an exchange is accessible through a digital platform or sometimes at a tangible address where investors organize to perform trading. Among the chief responsibilities of an exchange would be to uphold honest and fair-trading practices. These are instrumental in making sure that the distribution of supported security rates on that exchange are effectiv Read this Term-listed shares are dematerialized, which makes it hard to pin down which specific shares left an account.

XTB now lets clients make that call themselves, or keep FIFO if they prefer.

Routine Abroad, New for Warsaw

Choosing tax lots is standard fare in more developed brokerage markets. Interactive Brokers has long run a tool it calls the Tax Optimizer, which lets clients override FIFO with last-in first-out, highest-cost, or manually selected lots across its desktop, mobile, and web platforms.

In the United States, the IRS permits this so-called specific identification as long as the investor flags the chosen lot at the time of sale.

Automated versions have been around for years too. The robo-advisers Betterment and Wealthfront built tax-loss harvesting, which sells losing lots to offset gains elsewhere, into their platforms more than a decade ago, with Betterment launching its tool in 2014.

However, not every market allows the move. Germany makes FIFO mandatory for securities under its flat withholding tax, leaving investors no room to pick lots, while the United Kingdom pools shares of the same class together and applies a 30-day matching rule meant to stop investors gaming disposals.

Poland's FIFO default has sat closer to the German model, which is what makes XTB's change notable at home even as it catches up to tools traders elsewhere take for granted.

XTB's version is also narrower than Interactive Brokers' menu, offering a choice between manual selection and FIFO rather than a suite of algorithms, and it works only inside an XTB account.

The broker has spent the past year extending its options product across Europe and adding spot crypto, so a tax feature fits a wider effort to broaden what the platform does.

What It Changes for Investors

For active investors, the tool has real bite. Someone sitting on gains can close a higher-cost lot to book a loss that offsets earlier profits, or hang on to the cheapest shares to push that tax into a later year. For a buy-and-hold saver who rarely trims positions, it changes little.

Omar Arnaout, XTB's chief executive, tied the launch to client demand. "Investors have been asking us about the ability to manage individual positions for a long time," he said, adding that the company moved ahead "after external tax consultations" confirmed the approach was workable.

He also described XTB as "setting standards for the entire sector," a framing the company applied to its own product.

XTB paired the announcement with a claim that more than one in three investors in Poland now holds an account with it, which is confirmed by the latest KDPW data.

XTB has been drawing new traders onto the platform at pace, counting more than 2.16 million clients globally at the end of 2025. The tax feature also has limits worth noting: it optimizes only within a single XTB account, since each broker issues its own annual tax statement, and FIFO stays in place as the fallback.

A Product Push Backed by Heavy Marketing

XTB rolled out the change during an unusually strong stretch of results. The Warsaw-listed broker reported first-quarter net profit of PLN 535 million, up 176% from a year earlier, on operating income of PLN 1.09 billion.

That growth has been bought, in part, with marketing Marketing Marketing is defined as the business process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers' needs and wants.This is a crucial element of any operation or brokerage in the financial services space. Well-funded marketing campaigns are instrumental to the survival and longevity of these companies in an increasingly competitive industry.Within the forex space, marketers perform a wide range of functions to help procure, secure, or retain clients.In particular, newer forex brokers also have t Marketing is defined as the business process of identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers' needs and wants.This is a crucial element of any operation or brokerage in the financial services space. Well-funded marketing campaigns are instrumental to the survival and longevity of these companies in an increasingly competitive industry.Within the forex space, marketers perform a wide range of functions to help procure, secure, or retain clients.In particular, newer forex brokers also have t Read this Term. XTB lifted its marketing spend by close to 70% in 2025 to PLN 584.9 million and added 864,000 accounts during the year, a 73% jump. It has also kept regulators busy at home, absorbing a record fine from Poland's KNF that investors largely shrugged off.

The wider point is that all the maneuvering around FIFO stems from how Poland's capital gains levy was built. The tax arrived as a temporary measure more than two decades ago and has outlasted repeated talk of reform.

Until the finance ministry reworks it, brokers competing for Polish savers are left to engineer their own workarounds, and XTB has now turned one of them into a selling point.