just now
Monday: Is your broker ready for the school leavers who will code their own platform?
For those who grew up in the 1980s, 1990s or early 2000s, technology generally felt like an evolution. We moved from desktop computers to laptops, from basic Nokia mobile phones to smartphones, and from physical processes to digital ones. For the most part, the underlying way of life remained recognisable.
That will not be the experience of teenagers who are now in secondary education.
They are growing up as automation becomes part of everyday life. The way people learn, communicate, shop, work and manage money is being redesigned around software, data and artificial intelligence.
The UK government’s proposed changes to technical education are worth brokers paying attention to. From age 14, pupils are expected to have greater access to tech based subjects including artificial intelligence alongside core academic lessons.
A teenager who learns to build an app, create an AI tool or connect different services through an API will approach technology very differently from someone who has only ever used a finished product. They will not necessarily think of themselves as a passive user. They may see themselves as a builder, a designer or an operator of their own digital environment.
It is entirely plausible that the next generation of traders will expect to build their own front ends, connect third-party tools and customise the way they access markets and see this as entirely normal, having grown up learning it in an official educational environment.
The idea of logging into a rigid, generic platform and accepting whatever workflow a broker provides may feel as outdated to them as a Penny Farthing feels in the age of electric bicycles.
A trading platform that cannot accommodate user-developed applications, external analytics or API connectivity may still function perfectly well today. But the people entering the market tomorrow may not judge it by whether it functions. They will judge it by what it allows them to create.
The same generation will soon become the industry's employees and its customers. They will be comfortable building their own tools and far less patient with organisations that hide behind inflexible systems. They will expect technology to create access, not barriers.
Tuesday: Quality over quantity
I saw a report arguing that brokers and crypto platforms are moving away from measuring success through registrations, acquisition costs, first deposits and initial trading activity.
Those numbers are easy to track, but they do not show whether a client is suitable, engaged or likely to stay. A campaign can produce thousands of leads while delivering bonus hunters, inactive accounts or one-off traders. The key is to attract and keep the proper traders.
Brokers need technology that can support new products, liquidity sources, execution models and customer journeys. Fragmented liquidity across venues and asset classes adds further complexity, making connectivity, routing and data increasingly important.
The build-versus-buy question sits at the heart of this. Building from scratch takes years and costs tens of millions. An off-the-shelf platform leaves little room to differentiate. A hybrid approach – a robust core with distinctive and proprietary front ends, tools and customer experiences built on top – is usually the more practical answer.
It is no good building an influencer-led acquisition model around an undifferentiated front-end platform. Without a distinctive brand and adaptable infrastructure underneath it, the broker is simply paying to create churn.
Wednesday: Tik Tok, time has moved on.
A conversation with Charlotte Day, co-founder of Contentworks Agency in Limassol, Cyprus shed light on what brokers are asking for right now. She said “I think looking at what we won’t do is important, namely influencer management. I hate it. It leaves me cold.”
The influencer method of attracting clients to brokers is by now depressingly familiar: identify trading ‘gurus’ with large followings on YouTube, TikTok, X, and TradingView; pay them to post platform walkthroughs, ‘live trading’ streams, and promo codes; track sign-ups via affiliate links and hope the cost per acquisition stays below the lifetime value of the client. This often rewards firms with the weakest product and the most to hide. Ultimately, it’s a false economy.
Firms without a genuine USP use influencers to attract cheap attention without substance of product. Charlotte agreed – and added: “Yes. And IBs wanting stuff for free!” That last point is crucial. Introducing brokers and affiliates are frequently asked to work on rev-share alone, with no retainer. Many are milked for their client books, then dropped once the recurring business is internalised. It’s a churn-and-burn ecosystem that doesn’t suit the financial services industry.
Retail and commercial banks don’t use influencers to attract clients. They compete on product range, reputational credibility, and brand value. To do that, they build a refined user experience that gives clients a genuine reason to have a relationship with them.
There are two types of broker emerging from this cycle. The chasers – firms with obsolete tech, no proprietary IP, and a dependency on the affiliate roundabout, who’ll be acquired cheaply by larger players for their client lists, then migrated onto better platforms. And then there are the builders – firms investing in their own brand, user experience, and intellectual property, who don’t need to outsource their reputation to influencers. The latter compete on substance, not noise.
If you are a broker reading this, ask yourself: are you building a brand, or renting attention?
Thursday: Will Coinbase outpace your brokerage?
Coinbase has expanded its UK business by adding perpetual contracts, dated futures and crypto options.
The significance is not the product addition. It is that these are leveraged trading instruments firmly in FX industry territory – and that it is perpetual futures, something almost all brokers are talking about.
Why did companies like Coinbase suddenly appear and become huge? Not because their product was inherently exciting; at the start it was essentially one product, which is a crypto on/off ramp and a method of exchanging fiat for crypto and vice versa. That’s a far narrower product range than most established electronic trading firms, yet they scaled to massive size in just a few years.
The differentiator was intuitive user experience. Coinbase developed its own mobile‑first apps that gave people a simple way into becoming a crypto user. This created a loyalty that traditional brokers, despite offering a wider set of trading instruments, struggled to match. These brokerages have been held back by dated interfaces, underinvestment in intuitive apps compared with crypto-native firms, or an inability to develop and connect due to vendor lock-in.
Coinbase moving into leveraged perpetuals is another reminder of how quickly crypto-native firms have eclipsed established electronic trading firms that have been around for over two decades – in a matter of a few years. BingX moving into the CFD territory, acquiring brokerages along the way, is another example of the same pattern.
The lesson from Coinbase’s rise is that distribution and UX can outweigh product breadth in the early stages. The response for legacy firms is to modernise front‑ends, embrace mobile‑first design, and remove friction in onboarding and trading workflows. That means they are no longer at a UX disadvantage against crypto-native venues.
Friday: Prop traders are no longer naive.
I have been browsing the FX trading forums again, and one thing is becoming increasingly obvious: the average prop trading client is getting more sophisticated.
This is not necessarily good news for every prop firm.
The trader arriving today is more likely to understand drawdown, execution, slippage, position sizing and the difference between a genuine trading opportunity and a carefully designed marketing funnel. They are also becoming more wary of challenges that appear to encourage traders to pay an entry fee, reset repeatedly and never quite progress to a funded account.
That suspicion may not always be fair. Many traders fail because they oversize, ignore the rules or approach the challenge with a gaming mindset. But the industry should not assume that every failed trader is simply inexperienced, emotional or incapable of understanding risk. Traders are asking harder questions now, and they are comparing the quality of the experience they receive.
A challenge fee should not be treated as the price of having a punt.
Traders on Reddit forums are now talking about backtesting by using the risk level they intend to trade in the challenge. If that single day already exceeds the firm’s daily loss limit, traders now realise that the problem is not bad luck. It is position sizing.
Reducing the risk per trade is now understood as the difference between an account that survives a normal losing streak and one that is terminated before the trader has had time to demonstrate anything.
Some traders are openly discussing that a backtest of 60 or 80 trades is not enough to establish much confidence, considering it a short sequence in which luck has temporarily disguised itself as skill. They are now beginning to build a meaningful sample before using a paid challenge to discover whether the strategy is actually viable.
A brokerage serving prop firms should be able to provide a good-quality trading environment to prop traders. That means reliable execution, transparent pricing, stable infrastructure, clear rules and an experience that allows a trader to participate properly and continue refining their approach. Technology, liquidity and operational resilience are not marketing terms. They are the most important part of the product.
