XTB and the Brokers That Never Route an Order to WarsawNarrow moat

There is a company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange that is worth roughly four times the exchange itself. It is XTB, a broker listed here since 2016, and most of what it sells is not traded here at all.

XTB ended 2025 with more than 2,16 million clients worldwide and over 1,19 million active ones, selling contracts for difference and access to foreign shares. Its market value is about 18,0 billion złoty against GPW's own 4,2 billion¹². Every one of those Polish clients is a saver who did decide to invest rather than hold a deposit — and then bought something that generates no fee for the Polish order book.

This is a rivalry with an unusual settlement attached. GPW collects a listing fee from XTB and books turnover in XTB shares, which are among the more actively traded on the market. The exchange is therefore paid, in a small way, by the growth of the thing that competes with it. The parallel elsewhere in this collection is Google paying Apple for search placement, and it has the same limitation: the payment is real, and it is far smaller than what is being lost.

The structural problem is that retail accounted for 13 percent of Main Market turnover in 2025, down from 16 percent in 2023³⁴. A generation of Polish investors is forming its habits on platforms built around foreign instruments and leverage, and habits formed in a brokerage app are sticky. The exchange's counter is exchange-traded funds — the zero-fee programme, the new dividend, defence and bitcoin products, and turnover that more than doubled — which is an attempt to meet that investor with a product they actually want, on the domestic market.

Watch retail's share of Main Market turnover. If it stays near 13 percent while brokerage accounts multiply, the accounts are being opened somewhere else.