“We can see that it may be a bit harder for companies to market their products in the EU, but there is a period of normalisation once the rules are implemented, and I do believe there are more positives,” says Luis Dos Santos, the CEO of Trade Nation Portugal.
The London-based broker has just secured its license from the Iberian regulator, the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM), in a calculated bid to capture a slice of an EU market that’s becoming more and more restrictive toward speculation.
The top EU watchdog, ESMA, is visibly pushing the retail market toward safer instruments, like ETFs. At the same time, the regulator continues folding speculative assets into MiFID rules, with crypto perps and prediction markets – two of the darlings for retail traders in 2026 – falling under its supervisory umbrella.
Yet Santos, who’s been around the derivatives block, maintains that there are two sides to this coin.
Before taking the reins at Trade Nation’s Lisbon entity, he served as Sales Director for LATAM at Finalto in London, Global Head of Business Development at Markets.com, and Head of Partnerships at Vida Markets. His earlier tenure included leading UK Client Services and Onboarding at Trading 212 alongside various operational roles at IG Group.
This guided tour across jurisdictions has taught him that while certain trader cohorts have different priorities, virtually all retail investors demand fundamental capital security. They want absolute confidence that their deposit will not go up in smoke.
ESMA’s firm regulatory stance, Dos Santos believes, delivers precisely that safeguard.
“Clients feel that it is safer to invest in an EU-regulated firm instead of an offshore entity; they feel that they are in a safer environment. It’s one less problem they need to think of when it comes to their trading journey,” he notes.
Portugal is Not Just A Back-Office Convenience
Portugal is hardly the conventional setting from which to launch a European CFD broker.
That much Luis Dos Santos would readily attest to.
Lisbon, in particular, where Trade Nation has established its regional headquarters, is far better known for attracting software providers and global technology juggernauts. The Portuguese capital hosts substantial operational footprints for companies ranging from infrastructure giant Cloudflare to freelance talent platforms such as Upwork.
And we now have the full story of how Cloudflare is using a wall of waves in our Lisbon, Portugal office to create entropy and strengthen Internet security: https://t.co/DzLCjpsrIY https://t.co/JBWRbkvCFf
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) March 17, 2025
Indeed, compared to established European broker hubs like Cyprus, the CMVM register remains notably sparse, listing a mere 46 registered investment firms.
Why not follow the well-trodden regulatory path, then?
“Portugal is a base for digital-first customer service operations, compliance and technology teams; this is not just in our industry. You can see many fintechs and some non-Portuguese banks choosing Portugal as their base,” Dos Santos explains.
He is quick, though, to refute the notion that Trade Nation chose Lisbon purely for back-office convenience. Instead, he stresses that the stability of the regulator and the broader Portuguese economy act as a steady springboard for expanding the EU’s single market.
Securing regulatory approval by the CMVM, though, was far from a frictionless endeavour. “What I can say is it took us more than we wanted and more than we would like,” Santos quips.
The process spanned roughly twelve months from initial documentation to final authorisation.
Nonetheless, with the licensing phase complete, the Portuguese operations are now expanding. Santos says that they are now on a hiring spree to scale up the current ten-person outfit.
A glance at the broker’s career page reveals active recruitment across marketing, business development, and software engineering roles extending beyond the Iberian Peninsula.
“We are already thinking ahead because we are not just hiring to serve the Portuguese client base, but we are also hiring to serve our future client base as well that we will target this year,” he says.
“We are targeting mid- to high-end clients”
Despite being a mid-sized domestic market, Portugal itself remains a commercially attractive market for Trade Nation. Santos points out that this appeal is driven largely by significant demographic shifts in the country over the past five years.
Indeed, Portugal has emerged as a primary magnet for high-earning foreign residents, affluent expats and digital nomads. Recent estimates from the country’s national statistics office put the resident foreign‑national population at about 1.6 million people in 2025, corresponding to 14% of the total resident population.
“Definitely the focus for Portugal, more than the other countries in the EU, will be on active traders,” he notes. To capture this segment, the broker’s strategy involves offering localized products, such as Portuguese equities.
When assessing core unit economics such as first-time deposits (FTDs) and customer lifetime value (LTV) among Portuguese retail traders, Dos Santos offers a pragmatic appraisal compared to broader continental benchmarks. “I would say that they sit in the middle. It’s not your highest-end and top-tier clients,” he says.
This aligns somewhat with the broker’s broader strategy for the European market. “We are targeting more mid- to high-end clients,” Santos explains.
While declining to disclose precise customer acquisition costs (CAC) for the Portuguese market, Dos Santos confirms the firm’s target will remain below US$1000.
Looking beyond the local market, Santos remains characteristically reserved regarding immediate targets, but he confirms Germany as key in Trade Nation’s European roadmap. France and Italy also represent major opportunities due to their sheer market size.
Despite Restrictions, Retail Trading is Growing
Despite ESMA’s ongoing restrictions on leveraged products, with some countries taking an even harsher stance, such as Spain’s complete ban on CFD ads, retail interest has not abated.
According to FM Intelligence, in Poland alone, local brokers added a record 713,711 new trading accounts in the year through May 2026, proving that demand for active trading tools remains remarkably resilient.
“It is a growing market and we see a growing number of active traders across many EU countries. So definitely there is potential for growth,” he says.
While evidence suggests that a proportion of that interest has flown offshore in search of higher leverage, Santos believes that European retail traders have matured significantly, developing a sophisticated familiarity with leverage over successive market cycles.
Regarding localised regulatory shocks, such as the comprehensive ban on CFD advertising and distribution restrictions enforced by Spain’s regulator, Dos Santos does not anticipate a regulatory domino effect spreading across neighboring states.
“Does that mean that it’s not going to happen? Of course not. It can happen, but that’s a risk that will always be present, so what we need to do is just be very conscious of it and operate always within what the regulator asks us to do, which is what we do,” he says.
“We are using AI, but We Also Need the People”
The role of AI in reshaping the operations of brokers has been one of the most widely debated topics in 2026.
Across the industry, several high-profile companies have announced workforce reductions, pointing to AI-driven operational efficiencies as the primary justification. Whether AI adoption serves as a convenient narrative for routine corporate cost-cutting remains to be seen.
Dos Santos acknowledges that AI is driving structural shifts across the industry’s operations, but reiterates that Trade Nation is taking a fundamentally expansionary approach.
“We definitely use AI and we have implemented it across different areas. But it has not stopped us from hiring people,” he says. “We are using AI, but we also need people with relevant skillset to help us to go to the next stage of our growth ambition.”
The broker deploys AI models across three core operational pillars: regulatory compliance, client service, and software development pipelines.
“In our case, it is complementary to what we are doing and is helping us, but still we continue to hire more staff,” he stresses.
When pressed on emerging technological frameworks, such as implementing Model Context Protocol (MPC) integrations that enable retail clients to link general-purpose AI agents directly to broker platforms, Dos Santos remains tight-lipped and would only go as far as to confirm that client-facing AI products are on the broker’s strategic product roadmap.
In recent months, MCPs have become a trend in the industry, with platform providers joining the fray. Spotware’s CEO, Ilia Iarovitcyn, went as far as to say that AI agents will be the “primary distribution layer and the main point of interaction between traders and the market.”
In the first few weeks of agentic trading on Robinhood, over 50,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts and are trading millions of dollars per day of equities and options.
Writing and executing sophisticated strategies or optimizing your everyday spending no longer…
— Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) June 18, 2026
While MetaQuotes, the industry’s mainstay platform provider, has introduced native MCP connectivity to MT5, Trade Nation still offers MT4 alongside its own proprietary platform.
So, whether the broker will offer such connectivity remains squarely an internal strategic choice.
Gen Z Keep the Industry on Alert
A 2025 study by the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics connects the rising interest among Gen Z’s for speculative trading to macroeconomic reality: traditional financial milestones, particularly buying a home, are increasingly out of reach. For a generation priced out of housing markets, traditional low-yield savings accounts or slow-growing index ETFs hold limited appeal.
Dos Santos agrees that Generation Z represents a distinct cohort, operating as the first demographic to navigate financial markets within a fully digital, mobile-native environment.
“They consume online, they are exposed to online for most part of their day. This is a generation that is constantly consuming news and they are following what’s going on in the world. So I think it’s normal that they want to participate in the markets because it just follows that exposure.”
However, tapping into this demographic requires highly analytical, performance-driven marketing rather than traditional, broad-brush campaigns. “Of course, for us, it’s always better to analyse how we perform when it comes to our marketing,” he notes.
“This is a very demanding generation,” Dos Santos adds, viewing their high standards as a healthy driver of operational quality across the industry. “They want things to work properly. They want to have a seamless experience when it comes to their onboarding journey, to their payment journey, to their trading journey.”
The reality that younger traders can switch platform providers with a single swipe keeps brokers on their toes.
“We know that generally they want things done fast. They don’t want to wait for a very long time to get an answer to get results to get things done.”
There Is Still Room for Specialists
One of the products that has immense appeal for Gen Z is now receiving the CFD treatment by the EU’s top watchdog. A recent ESMA ruling regarding prediction markets has clarified that many event-driven contracts fall squarely under existing binary options bans, while others trigger complex, overlapping legal rules across gambling and crypto asset regulations.
Launching prediction markets within the bloc now requires navigating a dense labyrinth of regulatory hurdles. Even so, Dos Santos does not view prediction markets as direct competition to established multi-asset brokers.
“I think people who want to or they want to trade FX and CFDs, they may be doing both. Perhaps complementing but not competitors,” he says.
A similar strategic boundary applies to crypto perps, another speculative product category popular among retail traders, which is also being folded into MiFID rules.
While Trade Nation offers CFD crypto trading through its entities in the Seychelles, the Bahamas and South Africa, it excludes them from its European entity.
This focused approach contrasts sharply with the multi-asset ‘super-app’ model championed by fintech giants like Revolut, which has quietly rolled out CFD trading in 29 countries. Revolut recently solidified its position as the most valuable startup in Europe with a US$115 billion valuation, leveraging a massive user base to cross-sell financial products.
On the other hand, Dos Santos remains convinced that there is room for deep product specialisation.
“They may have their provider to trade crypto, but due to our offering, due to the way that we operate, the transparency on our pricing and how specialized we are on the CFD trading side, we do believe that some crypto traders and investors can come to us when it comes to trade other other products rather than crypto.”
IPOs and Commodities to Dominate Late 2026
The retail trading sector has presented a fascinating divergence throughout 2026. While flows frequently dominated retail crypto trading, engagement in commodity CFDs experienced a powerful resurgence.
Dos Santos anticipates that commodities will remain prime drivers of retail trading volume through the second half of the year, driven by persistent macroeconomic uncertainties across key global economies.
“One of the big talking points recently is also equities, especially some IPOs,” he adds. “We had the recent one with SpaceX, and there are other IPOs coming in. So I’ll say that definitely is going to take a big interest from investors and traders in the next six months.”
“We can see that it may be a bit harder for companies to market their products in the EU, but there is a period of normalisation once the rules are implemented, and I do believe there are more positives,” says Luis Dos Santos, the CEO of Trade Nation Portugal.
The London-based broker has just secured its license from the Iberian regulator, the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (CMVM), in a calculated bid to capture a slice of an EU market that’s becoming more and more restrictive toward speculation.
The top EU watchdog, ESMA, is visibly pushing the retail market toward safer instruments, like ETFs. At the same time, the regulator continues folding speculative assets into MiFID rules, with crypto perps and prediction markets – two of the darlings for retail traders in 2026 – falling under its supervisory umbrella.
Yet Santos, who’s been around the derivatives block, maintains that there are two sides to this coin.
Before taking the reins at Trade Nation’s Lisbon entity, he served as Sales Director for LATAM at Finalto in London, Global Head of Business Development at Markets.com, and Head of Partnerships at Vida Markets. His earlier tenure included leading UK Client Services and Onboarding at Trading 212 alongside various operational roles at IG Group.
This guided tour across jurisdictions has taught him that while certain trader cohorts have different priorities, virtually all retail investors demand fundamental capital security. They want absolute confidence that their deposit will not go up in smoke.
ESMA’s firm regulatory stance, Dos Santos believes, delivers precisely that safeguard.
“Clients feel that it is safer to invest in an EU-regulated firm instead of an offshore entity; they feel that they are in a safer environment. It’s one less problem they need to think of when it comes to their trading journey,” he notes.
Portugal is Not Just A Back-Office Convenience
Portugal is hardly the conventional setting from which to launch a European CFD broker.
That much Luis Dos Santos would readily attest to.
Lisbon, in particular, where Trade Nation has established its regional headquarters, is far better known for attracting software providers and global technology juggernauts. The Portuguese capital hosts substantial operational footprints for companies ranging from infrastructure giant Cloudflare to freelance talent platforms such as Upwork.
And we now have the full story of how Cloudflare is using a wall of waves in our Lisbon, Portugal office to create entropy and strengthen Internet security: https://t.co/DzLCjpsrIY https://t.co/JBWRbkvCFf
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) March 17, 2025
Indeed, compared to established European broker hubs like Cyprus, the CMVM register remains notably sparse, listing a mere 46 registered investment firms.
Why not follow the well-trodden regulatory path, then?
“Portugal is a base for digital-first customer service operations, compliance and technology teams; this is not just in our industry. You can see many fintechs and some non-Portuguese banks choosing Portugal as their base,” Dos Santos explains.
He is quick, though, to refute the notion that Trade Nation chose Lisbon purely for back-office convenience. Instead, he stresses that the stability of the regulator and the broader Portuguese economy act as a steady springboard for expanding the EU’s single market.
Securing regulatory approval by the CMVM, though, was far from a frictionless endeavour. “What I can say is it took us more than we wanted and more than we would like,” Santos quips.
The process spanned roughly twelve months from initial documentation to final authorisation.
Nonetheless, with the licensing phase complete, the Portuguese operations are now expanding. Santos says that they are now on a hiring spree to scale up the current ten-person outfit.
A glance at the broker’s career page reveals active recruitment across marketing, business development, and software engineering roles extending beyond the Iberian Peninsula.
“We are already thinking ahead because we are not just hiring to serve the Portuguese client base, but we are also hiring to serve our future client base as well that we will target this year,” he says.
“We are targeting mid- to high-end clients”
Despite being a mid-sized domestic market, Portugal itself remains a commercially attractive market for Trade Nation. Santos points out that this appeal is driven largely by significant demographic shifts in the country over the past five years.
Indeed, Portugal has emerged as a primary magnet for high-earning foreign residents, affluent expats and digital nomads. Recent estimates from the country’s national statistics office put the resident foreign‑national population at about 1.6 million people in 2025, corresponding to 14% of the total resident population.
“Definitely the focus for Portugal, more than the other countries in the EU, will be on active traders,” he notes. To capture this segment, the broker’s strategy involves offering localized products, such as Portuguese equities.
When assessing core unit economics such as first-time deposits (FTDs) and customer lifetime value (LTV) among Portuguese retail traders, Dos Santos offers a pragmatic appraisal compared to broader continental benchmarks. “I would say that they sit in the middle. It’s not your highest-end and top-tier clients,” he says.
This aligns somewhat with the broker’s broader strategy for the European market. “We are targeting more mid- to high-end clients,” Santos explains.
While declining to disclose precise customer acquisition costs (CAC) for the Portuguese market, Dos Santos confirms the firm’s target will remain below US$1000.
Looking beyond the local market, Santos remains characteristically reserved regarding immediate targets, but he confirms Germany as key in Trade Nation’s European roadmap. France and Italy also represent major opportunities due to their sheer market size.
Despite Restrictions, Retail Trading is Growing
Despite ESMA’s ongoing restrictions on leveraged products, with some countries taking an even harsher stance, such as Spain’s complete ban on CFD ads, retail interest has not abated.
According to FM Intelligence, in Poland alone, local brokers added a record 713,711 new trading accounts in the year through May 2026, proving that demand for active trading tools remains remarkably resilient.
“It is a growing market and we see a growing number of active traders across many EU countries. So definitely there is potential for growth,” he says.
While evidence suggests that a proportion of that interest has flown offshore in search of higher leverage, Santos believes that European retail traders have matured significantly, developing a sophisticated familiarity with leverage over successive market cycles.
Regarding localised regulatory shocks, such as the comprehensive ban on CFD advertising and distribution restrictions enforced by Spain’s regulator, Dos Santos does not anticipate a regulatory domino effect spreading across neighboring states.
“Does that mean that it’s not going to happen? Of course not. It can happen, but that’s a risk that will always be present, so what we need to do is just be very conscious of it and operate always within what the regulator asks us to do, which is what we do,” he says.
“We are using AI, but We Also Need the People”
The role of AI in reshaping the operations of brokers has been one of the most widely debated topics in 2026.
Across the industry, several high-profile companies have announced workforce reductions, pointing to AI-driven operational efficiencies as the primary justification. Whether AI adoption serves as a convenient narrative for routine corporate cost-cutting remains to be seen.
Dos Santos acknowledges that AI is driving structural shifts across the industry’s operations, but reiterates that Trade Nation is taking a fundamentally expansionary approach.
“We definitely use AI and we have implemented it across different areas. But it has not stopped us from hiring people,” he says. “We are using AI, but we also need people with relevant skillset to help us to go to the next stage of our growth ambition.”
The broker deploys AI models across three core operational pillars: regulatory compliance, client service, and software development pipelines.
“In our case, it is complementary to what we are doing and is helping us, but still we continue to hire more staff,” he stresses.
When pressed on emerging technological frameworks, such as implementing Model Context Protocol (MPC) integrations that enable retail clients to link general-purpose AI agents directly to broker platforms, Dos Santos remains tight-lipped and would only go as far as to confirm that client-facing AI products are on the broker’s strategic product roadmap.
In recent months, MCPs have become a trend in the industry, with platform providers joining the fray. Spotware’s CEO, Ilia Iarovitcyn, went as far as to say that AI agents will be the “primary distribution layer and the main point of interaction between traders and the market.”
In the first few weeks of agentic trading on Robinhood, over 50,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts and are trading millions of dollars per day of equities and options.
Writing and executing sophisticated strategies or optimizing your everyday spending no longer…
— Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) June 18, 2026
While MetaQuotes, the industry’s mainstay platform provider, has introduced native MCP connectivity to MT5, Trade Nation still offers MT4 alongside its own proprietary platform.
So, whether the broker will offer such connectivity remains squarely an internal strategic choice.
Gen Z Keep the Industry on Alert
A 2025 study by the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics connects the rising interest among Gen Z’s for speculative trading to macroeconomic reality: traditional financial milestones, particularly buying a home, are increasingly out of reach. For a generation priced out of housing markets, traditional low-yield savings accounts or slow-growing index ETFs hold limited appeal.
Dos Santos agrees that Generation Z represents a distinct cohort, operating as the first demographic to navigate financial markets within a fully digital, mobile-native environment.
“They consume online, they are exposed to online for most part of their day. This is a generation that is constantly consuming news and they are following what’s going on in the world. So I think it’s normal that they want to participate in the markets because it just follows that exposure.”
However, tapping into this demographic requires highly analytical, performance-driven marketing rather than traditional, broad-brush campaigns. “Of course, for us, it’s always better to analyse how we perform when it comes to our marketing,” he notes.
“This is a very demanding generation,” Dos Santos adds, viewing their high standards as a healthy driver of operational quality across the industry. “They want things to work properly. They want to have a seamless experience when it comes to their onboarding journey, to their payment journey, to their trading journey.”
The reality that younger traders can switch platform providers with a single swipe keeps brokers on their toes.
“We know that generally they want things done fast. They don’t want to wait for a very long time to get an answer to get results to get things done.”
There Is Still Room for Specialists
One of the products that has immense appeal for Gen Z is now receiving the CFD treatment by the EU’s top watchdog. A recent ESMA ruling regarding prediction markets has clarified that many event-driven contracts fall squarely under existing binary options bans, while others trigger complex, overlapping legal rules across gambling and crypto asset regulations.
Launching prediction markets within the bloc now requires navigating a dense labyrinth of regulatory hurdles. Even so, Dos Santos does not view prediction markets as direct competition to established multi-asset brokers.
“I think people who want to or they want to trade FX and CFDs, they may be doing both. Perhaps complementing but not competitors,” he says.
A similar strategic boundary applies to crypto perps, another speculative product category popular among retail traders, which is also being folded into MiFID rules.
While Trade Nation offers CFD crypto trading through its entities in the Seychelles, the Bahamas and South Africa, it excludes them from its European entity.
This focused approach contrasts sharply with the multi-asset ‘super-app’ model championed by fintech giants like Revolut, which has quietly rolled out CFD trading in 29 countries. Revolut recently solidified its position as the most valuable startup in Europe with a US$115 billion valuation, leveraging a massive user base to cross-sell financial products.
On the other hand, Dos Santos remains convinced that there is room for deep product specialisation.
“They may have their provider to trade crypto, but due to our offering, due to the way that we operate, the transparency on our pricing and how specialized we are on the CFD trading side, we do believe that some crypto traders and investors can come to us when it comes to trade other other products rather than crypto.”
IPOs and Commodities to Dominate Late 2026
The retail trading sector has presented a fascinating divergence throughout 2026. While flows frequently dominated retail crypto trading, engagement in commodity CFDs experienced a powerful resurgence.
Dos Santos anticipates that commodities will remain prime drivers of retail trading volume through the second half of the year, driven by persistent macroeconomic uncertainties across key global economies.
“One of the big talking points recently is also equities, especially some IPOs,” he adds. “We had the recent one with SpaceX, and there are other IPOs coming in. So I’ll say that definitely is going to take a big interest from investors and traders in the next six months.”
