The Products Brokers Use to Win New Clients Are Often the Ones EU Rules Won't Let You Trade

Finance Magnates set out how the largest brokers and exchanges now split client acquisition from client monetisation — leading with a simple, topical product to open the door, then earning through leveraged and derivative products once a client is inside.

The figures are striking. Europe's XTB added 703,333 new clients in the first half of 2026, and the products those clients touched first were overwhelmingly plain: cash shares (38.8% of EU first transactions), ETFs (27.7%) and investment plans (16.4%). Yet CFDs still generated about 96% of XTB's trading result — PLN 1.98 billion of PLN 2.07 billion. The acquisition product and the revenue product are not the same thing.

Elsewhere the acquisition bets are more exotic. IG Group is paying roughly $1.3 billion for Underdog to bolt prediction markets onto its US business, expecting to more than double US revenue and lift monthly active customers more than tenfold. Robinhood's event contracts reached $156 million in Q2 revenue — a tenfold year-on-year jump, and now its second-largest revenue line after options ($342 million), ahead of equities and crypto. Binance is using tokenised stocks (“bStocks”) as an on-ramp, reporting that 41.5% of bStocks users were new to traditional investing. Coinbase is assembling an “everything exchange” and using zero-fee equity trading as the low-friction hook.

The common thread: a friendly, headline-grabbing product gets you in; leverage and derivatives pay the bills.

Here is the catch for anyone trading from inside the EU or EEA: most of the acquisition products driving those numbers are either banned or unavailable to you.

Prediction markets and event contractsare the clearest case. These are all-or-nothing bets on a discrete outcome — structurally close to binary options, which ESMA and national regulators have permanently prohibited for EU retail clients since 2019. IG's own leadership has publicly framed prediction markets as binary options by another name, which is precisely why the Underdog expansion is a US growth story and not a European one. Robinhood's event-contract engine sits outside the EU retail perimeter for the same reason.

Tokenised stocksoccupy a grey zone. Where a tokenised equity behaves like a transferable security it falls under MiFID II rather than the newer Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), and the two regimes have not been fully reconciled. In practice, that ambiguity is why Binance's bStocks were not offered to EEA users at launch. The acquisition hook that pulled in 41.5% first-time investors elsewhere is simply not on the menu for EU retail.

CFDs — the actual revenue engine — areavailable in the EU, but on tight terms. ESMA's product-intervention rules cap retail leverage at 30:1 on major FX pairs (and lower on other assets), mandate negative-balance protection, enforce margin close-out at 50%, ban trading incentives, and require standardised risk warnings. That is why XTB's EU acquisition mix leans on shares, ETFs and investment plans: they are the products it is allowed to advertise freely to European retail, while the leveraged product that pays for everything sits behind ESMA's guardrails.

The upshot is that the “product a broker is betting on” abroad tells you little about what you can actually access here. A European trader reading global broker marketing is often looking at a shop window stocked for a different jurisdiction.

First, judge a broker on the products you can legally use, not the ones making headlines.If a platform's growth story is built on prediction markets or tokenised equities, that engine is largely irrelevant to an EU/EEA account — and if a broker is aggressively marketing an “event contract” or “prediction” product to you as a European retail client, treat that as a flag to check which entity and which regulator you are actually dealing with. The all-or-nothing binary structure is banned here for a reason: the expected-value maths runs against the retail buyer.

Second, the plain products are the point, not a limitation. ESMA's framework deliberately steers EU retail toward instruments with transparent pricing and capped leverage. A broker that keeps EU clients inside a fully authorised EU entity, trading regulated instruments under those rules, is offering the protected version by design. XTB itself is a case in point — authorised by Poland's KNF (XTB S.A.) — and the same logic applies to the EU-regulated operators we cover: IG serves European clients through IG Europe GmbH under BaFin, Plus500 through Plus500CY Ltd (CySEC) with Investor Compensation Fund coverage, eToro through eToro (Europe) Ltd under CySEC, and Pepperstone through Pepperstone EU Ltd (CySEC 388/20).

Two brokers whose EU entities carry the exact backstop this piece is about — an investor-compensation scheme standing behind an EU-authorised book: Pepperstone (Pepperstone EU Ltd, CySEC 388/20, Investor Compensation Fund up to €20,000) and Interactive Brokers (Interactive Brokers Ireland Ltd, Central Bank of Ireland, Irish Investor Compensation Scheme up to €20,000).