The LSE Directory / CFD and forex brokers
Trading 212 is a London-headquartered fintech brokerage that lets retail customers trade stocks and ETFs commission-free, alongside leveraged Contracts for Difference (CFDs) on forex, indices, commodities and stocks. Its own web, desktop and mobile apps support fractional share investing from as little as £1, and a portfolio-building tool called Pies and AutoInvest lets a user split a custom or ready-made selection of stocks and ETFs into percentage-weighted slices, then schedule recurring deposits (daily to every six months) that buy fractional shares to keep the target allocation on autopilot. For UK clients it also offers a Stocks ISA, a Cash ISA, a SIPP and a multi-currency debit card. The firm built its identity on being the first UK retail broker to offer zero-commission share dealing, undercutting the flat per-trade fees traditional stockbrokers charged, and it later extended a similarly stripped-down, no-commission pricing model to CFD trading. Where many CFD-led brokers court active, short-term traders, Pies and AutoInvest is aimed at buy-and-hold retail investors who want automated, diversified, recurring investing rather than manual order placement, a positioning closer to a robo-advisor layered onto a self-directed brokerage. Rather than operate through one passported entity, it runs separately regulated legal entities by jurisdiction and product line, spanning the UK, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany and Australia. Trading 212 traces back to 2004, when Ivan Ashminov and Borislav Nedialkov started the business in Sofia, Bulgaria under the name Avus Capital Group; Ashminov, then in his mid-twenties, wrote the code for the platform's first version himself and later picked the name Trading 212 after Manhattan's 212 area code. The company is regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Bulgaria's Financial Supervision Commission, the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, Germany's BaFin and Australia's ASIC. As of 2025 the group reported around 4.5 million funded customer accounts (3 million in the UK) and roughly £25 billion in client assets under administration; its UK entity, Trading 212 UK Limited, reported revenue of £277.6 million and net profit of £92.2 million for 2025, up from £194.1 million revenue and £43.0 million net profit in 2024. The company remains privately held. In August 2024, Trading 212 acquired Germany's FXFlat Bank GmbH, a BaFin-licensed firm operating since 1997, to secure a fully licensed German banking entity, and began onboarding German clients to its own platform through it. In February 2026, it received FCA authorisation to offer self-invested personal pensions (SIPPs) in the UK, extending its tax-wrapped product range beyond the Stocks and Cash ISA.
