Annual Performance Review: How Top Publicly Traded Brokers Compare in Revenue and Margins

TradingPedia's latest annual sweep across ten publicly listed online brokers returns a clean quantitative read on a two-speed sector — and the gap between scale-platform operators and CFD-spread capture houses is structural, not cyclical.

According to TradingPedia's fiscal-year comparison, revenue growth in local currency sorts the cohort cleanly. Charles Schwab (+22%), StoneX (+20% operating revenues), and Interactive Brokers (+20%) lead the table. CMC Markets and XTB follow at +15% each. Mid-pack: eToro (+10% net contribution), Swissquote (+9%), IG Group (+7%). Plus500 (+3%) and NAGA (−1% reported; +3.5% FX-adjusted) trail. Growth rates are intra-company YoY in local reporting currency; fiscal calendars are non-uniform across the peer set.

Margin architecture

Interactive Brokers remains the sector's efficiency benchmark, expanding pre-tax margin to 77% on an almost fully automated cost base. Swissquote lifted pre-tax margin to 58.1% from 52.3%; excluding roughly CHF 50m of one-offs, the underlying margin held above 51%. These are not statistical outliers. They represent the operating ceiling for retail brokerage in the current revenue mix.

The cost of land-grab strategies is exposed in the same dataset. XTB booked record revenue against a 48% cost surge, producing a 25% profit decline. NAGA remained in operational turnaround. StoneX complicates the read: firm-wide records alongside a 35% revenue contraction in the Self-Directed/Retail segment, known commercially as FOREX.com. The divergence inside a single legal entity is the clearest signal that retail brokerage economics are bifurcating at the segment level, not only at the company level.

Operational verdict

The split tracks business-model exposure directly. Firms monetising client asset bases and exchange-traded volumes outgrew those reliant primarily on OTC CFD spread capture. OTC-heavy peers faced a subdued-volatility stretch through much of mid-to-late 2025 before conditions firmed at year-end and into 2026.

For platform selection, the relevant filter is the revenue model underwriting the brokerage itself — not chart cosmetics or DOM depth. A 77% pre-tax margin is structural insulation against execution drift; a 35% segment contraction is a stability signal worth monitoring on the FOREX.com stack. Binary read: scale-platform brokers remain online with margin headroom; CFD-heritage operators are functional but cost-pressured, with XTB and NAGA flagged for scrutiny on their next reporting cycle.

Practical read-through: a broker running 77% pre-tax margins has capital to maintain order routing infrastructure and API endpoints at low latency. A broker booking a 25% profit decline on record revenue has thinned its reinvestment budget. Same reporting cycle, opposite maintenance posture.

Annual report PDFs across this peer set frequently surface with broken hyperlinks and degraded text rendering. A practical walkthrough on fixing document-fidelity failures in financial PDFs addresses the same class of bug.