On Monday morning, Plus500 posted its results for the third quarter of 2025.
Those showed the firm had revenues that were close to flat year on year. Revenue for the three month period was $182.7m, compared to $187.3m for the same three month period in 2024.
You can see the broker’s Q3 revenues from 2020 – 2025 below.
As is always the case with this industry, it’s hard to have consistent growth because you are reliant to such a large degree on unpredictable volatility.
Having said that, if you look at the broker’s performance in the past, you can see it had tech-firm like growth for the first few years of its existence.
What changed that stopped growth?
Ultimately the CFD market got super competitive and regulations have made it much harder to do business.
Consequently it is going to be hard for the broker to grow in core markets because there isn’t much to grow into.
That is why the firm has begun doing what firms usually do when they’re in this position – they begin expanding into new markets and making acquisitions.
Over the last 12 months, the company has acquired licences in Canada and Colombia. The broker is also in the process of getting a license in Chile.
But the stand out performer has been the US.
In Plus500’s latest results, they say non-OTC business, which is futures and share dealing, was 15% of Q3 revenues. Last year it was 10% for the whole 12 month period.
Share dealing revenue seems miniscule so this must primarily be US futures that is making money.
If you imagine that this revenue line did not exist before, you can filter it out of prior results.
Doing that means Q3 revenues look like this:
Again, this is not quite a like for like comparison because volatility and activity was so high in 2020 and 2021.
But the broader point is that Plus500’s CFD business looks pretty flat in growth terms and definitely way behind what is was in the first few years of its existence.
On the other hand, if you think of the futures business as a standalone entity, it does look very impressive.
The platform went live properly in the second half of 2023. The company did not say how much it made in revenue from it in that year. However, for last year it was approximately $76m.
For this year it has already surpassed that, making just north of $81m in the first nine months of the year. If the trend continues – and if you think of the BTC and gold volatility we’ve seen, that seems possible – it would mean revenues of $108m for the year.
So the company has gone from zero to $76m and (potentially) $108m. If that happens then it would be a 42% year-on-year uplift, which is strong.
Whether that’s sustainable, I don’t know. But if you look at the company’s competitors, it is quite similar to what Plus500 did with CFDs. They came in, they made a better mobile product and did better marketing than their peers, and they made a lot of money as a result.
The company will be trying to do the same thing in India with its futures and options business there.
It will also likely be to make a big push in Chile and Colombia.
But if those efforts don’t take off and the US doesn’t continue to see growth then Plus500 will probably face the same problem that so many companies in this sector do – they print money and are an amazing business, but they can’t grow anymore.
