“You can’t hide behind hacks anymore. If you don’t give the appropriate value, you don’t receive the reward,” said George Kyriakoudes, CEO of Skilling, in an episode of FM Talks.
It was not merely a remark about marketing. It was, in many ways, a diagnosis of the modern retail trading industry itself. The era of gimmicks, friction-heavy onboarding and easy customer acquisition has faded. In its place stands a more demanding retail trader: faster, more informed, less loyal and armed with enough technology to make yesterday’s smart money look surprisingly analogue.
Kyriakoudes would know.
Promoted from CFO to CEO of Skilling in 2024, he now leads one of the more unconventional brokers operating out of Cyprus and beyond. Founded on Swedish and Norwegian roots, Skilling has built its business largely around traders in Western Europe, where digital convenience is treated less as a luxury and more as a constitutional right.
He also leads the broker at a moment when the behavioural landscape of retail trading has been thoroughly terraformed.
The Rise of the Informed Retail Trader
Back in 2021, during the Gamestop and AMC frenzy, the narrative surrounding retail traders was distinctly patronising. They were “dumb money,” impulsive hobbyists armed with stimulus cheques and Reddit threads.
But does that caricature still apply?
“I would say the modern trader is significantly more informed and more global, as well as technologically enabled,” Kyriakoudes argued.
They consume macroeconomic content daily, understand central bank policy and compare execution quality across brokerages with sophistication.
“They are building an identity around the markets they are involved in,” he added.
One characteristic that would likely surprise even some Wall Street veterans is the speed with which traders now migrate between products and platforms. One week they are riding a crypto rally; the next they are positioning around gold, before pivoting to prediction markets ahead of geopolitical events.
“They are no longer loyal to a single asset class or even platform,” Kyriakoudes highlighted.
Why Gen Z Is Embracing Risk
Alongside this behavioural shift has come a demographic one. Younger traders appear markedly more comfortable with leverage, derivatives and complex instruments. Industry data suggests that Gen Z investors may allocate as much as a quarter of their portfolios to derivatives and crypto.
The question, naturally, is why. Is this a permanent evolution in risk appetite, or merely the financial equivalent of free-climbing skyscrapers for that adrenaline kick?
For Kyriakoudes, the answer lies largely in the environment this generation inherited: instant information, widely accessible crypto products and an economy mediated almost entirely through mobile applications.
“Gen Z’s have also understood that salaries and pensions are not going to be their main source of income, or their only source of income,” he noted.
Indeed, with median income decoupling from wealth creation, the prospect of patiently compounding ETF returns over several decades holds limited appeal for young people.
Higher risk is not thrill-seeking so much as adaptation.
“They could probably critise us by saying, ‘You guys left us with this kind of environment to work with,’” Kyriakoudes mused.
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The Curious Return of “Boring” Assets
One of the more intriguing paradoxes of 2026 is that, despite the appetite for speculative assets, gold, silver and oil CFDs have also experienced significant inflows – instruments broadly regarded as boring.
For Kyriakoudes, however, this fits neatly within the profile of the modern trader.
“They are not just chasing meme stocks or some altcoin; they are actively taking a macro view on global events. It shows a certain degree of maturity.”
And, admittedly, even supposedly dull instruments become more exciting when they swing 3% to 5% in a single trading session.
“I think oil, and actually natural gas, will continue to be at the forefront of people’s minds. And the other thing we are seeing quite a bit is that people want to trade volatility itself. Unsurprisingly, volatility is the word for 2026,” Kyriakoudes noted.
Prediction Markets: Wisdom of Crowds or Binary Options Reborn?
Prediction markets have emerged as one of the hottest topics of 2026. These peer-to-peer exchanges allow users to buy and sell contracts tied to future outcomes: the result of the NBA Finals, the box-office performance of Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, or whether Elon Musk will prevail against Sam Altman in court.
To companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket, these platforms represent the purest expression of the “wisdom of crowds”: collective human judgement distilled into probability. To sceptics, meanwhile, they look suspiciously like binary options in fashionable clothes.
Kyriakoudes, though, is not that cynical.
“They do have a key difference, in that these contracts are traded in exchanges and the resolution mechanisms are usually external,” he explained.
During the binary-options boom, brokers often created the product, priced it and acted as counterparty simultaneously, a structure that inevitably raised questions around conflicts of interest. “It also resulted in certain brokers giving the industry a bad name,” he noted.
Still, he is not ready to call prediction markets the next frontier in multi-asset trading. Yet the concept does possess something traditional CFDs arguably lack: utility tied directly to outcomes rather than price action alone. The question is whether these platforms evolve toward macroeconomic forecasting or remain dominated by sport and entertainment.
According to investment firm Bernstein, sport currently accounts for 62% prediction market trading volume.
In the AI Era, Relevance Becomes Everything
In many respects, the arrival of GenAI has reset the rules of digital engagement altogether.
It used to be that Google search and comparison websites were the main way to draw people’s attention. “If you go back 20 years, you could SEO hack almost anything,” Kyriakoudes said.
Today, though, users increasingly consult AI agents such as Perplexity AI or Gemini, asking straightforward questions such as where they should trade.
“The whole system is adapting toward relevance. Are you giving value to the user?” Kyriakoudes said.
Brokers must also contend with dramatically lower tolerance for friction. In Western Europe, where Skilling has a strong presence, users now expect onboarding to be entirely automated. If the process feels cumbersome, they simply leave.
“And then, look, the gift and the curse of our industry is that we have this amazingly successful platform, MetaTrader,” he said. “Everybody has MetaTrader; some may also have cTrader. The question is: how do you distinguish between brokers if all the good ones have the main platforms?”
Skilling’s answer has been to build its own proprietary platform. Kyriakoudes argues that it is more accessible for beginners while still supporting advanced trading functionality. The broker has also integrated tools such as TradingView alongside localised customer support and expanded analytical features.
Education in the Age of Infinite Information
Generative AI has not merely changed the rules of engagement; it has also overwhelmed traders with information. AI-driven sentiment analysis, real-time news cycles and endless streams of commentary mean that the signal is becoming noise.
Now the challenge is filtering a constant torrent of data. So, what does this mean for education?
“Education needs to be adaptable, and it shouldn’t just come under the education section on your website,” Kyriakoudes noted.
Skilling has responded by developing its own integrated AI tool, allowing traders to interact dynamically with market information, pricing and trading concepts in real time.
“The good news is that the tools you can use to transform this area have massively upgraded,” he said.
