Does Web Traffic Actually Drive CFD Volumes? We Ran the Numbers

Conventional
wisdom in brokerage marketing holds that more website traffic means more
business. A dataset from the newly
launched fmintelligence portal puts that assumption to rest.

Across 47
retail forex and CFD brokers, the correlation between organic web traffic and
actual trading volumes comes in at just 0.09 – statistically, almost nothing.
The data, which pairs January 2026 traffic figures with recent average monthly
CFD volumes, suggests that the two metrics are essentially measuring different
things entirely.

Traffic Is Booming, Just
Not Evenly

The
sector’s total organic traffic hit 40.2 million visits in January 2026, up
36.5% from 29.4 million a year earlier. On the surface, that looks like
broad-based growth. Dig in, and the picture is more divided: 57% of brokers
gained visitors year-over-year, while 36% shed them. The top five brokers alone
now account for almost 74% of all organic visits, up from 69% in January 2025.

OANDA leads
the traffic rankings, eToro follows and Capital.com posted the most visible
climb of any large broker.

All of this
is happening at a time when the number of active CFD accounts jumped by nearly
one million in a single quarter, reaching
almost 7 million by the end of 2025, according to Finance Magnates
Intelligence data.

Volume Leaders Live in a
Different World

However, swap
the ranking criteria from traffic to trading volume, and the leaderboard barely
overlaps.

IC Markets
tops the volume table with $1.76 trillion in average monthly activity, yet
ranks fifth by web traffic. OANDA, by contrast, pulls in 14.6 million visitors
to generate $430 billion in volume.

CMC Markets
and Plus500 tell another story worth noting. Both saw traffic fall, according
to Finance Magnates Intelligence data, yet both held onto substantial
trading volumes positioning among top 10 brokers. Client retention, it turns
out, doesn’t depend on Google rankings.

The Full Picture Is on fmintelligence

This is
only part of what the data shows. The full analysis – covering all 47 brokers,
traffic-to-volume efficiency ratios, business model breakdowns, and
year-over-year growth patterns across broker size tiers, is available on the
newly launched fmintelligence
portal.

Registration
is free, and the platform gives access to broker volume data, traffic metrics,
and in-depth industry research that goes well beyond what any single article
can cover.

We’ve
recently also written about how much total CFD trading volume MetaTrader
5 holds, we analyzed India, and we examined how regional internet traffic
is shifting among retail traders

This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.

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