Trading Fees & VolumeNarrow moat

The most visible toll GPW collects is the transaction fee: a small charge on every trade executed on its markets, paid by the brokers and their clients on both sides. This is the beating heart of the financial segment's revenue, and it scales directly with turnover — the total value of securities changing hands. When Polish equities are active and rising, as they were spectacularly in 2025, volumes surge and trading revenue with them; when markets are quiet or falling, volumes ebb and so does the toll.

That volume-sensitivity is the franchise's blessing and its characteristic risk. On the upside, GPW enjoys enormous operating leverage: the cost of matching one more trade on an already-built platform is almost nothing, so incremental volume drops almost straight to profit — which is why a strong market year produces outsized earnings growth. On the downside, the exchange is a leveraged play on trading activity it does not control, activity driven by market sentiment, interest rates, and the global appetite for emerging-market equities. The toll is reliable in the sense that it is always collected; it is cyclical in the sense that how much gets collected swings with a market the exchange can influence but never command — 2025's +18,7% was the swing working in GPW's favor¹.