Online Trading Platform Market Projected to Reach $18.18 Billion by 2031 as Mobile Becomes the Front Door for Retail Investors

Mordor Intelligence values the online trading platform market at $11.65 billion in 2025 and projects $18.18 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 7.66% from 2026 to 2031. Active Companies from around the markets with current developments this week include: Quote Daddy (quotedaddy.com), Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: IBKR), Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe BZX: CBOE), Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ), and Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL).

A second forecaster lands in the same neighbourhood. Fortune Business Insights puts the market at $10.82 billion in 2025 and $11.57 billion in 2026, rising to $18.50 billion by 2034, a 6.00% compound annual growth rate from 2026 to 2034, and points to AI-driven analytics, digital assets and mobile adoption as drivers. Both figures are third-party projections of market value, not revenue any single company will capture, and the gap in growth rates reflects different forecast windows and methods.

The Mordor report is specific about where the activity is. It says smartphones have become the primary entry point for retail investors, that retail investors accounted for 69.59% of platform volume in 2025, and that cloud-based deployment held 63.42% of the market. It also highlights API-based brokerage-as-a-service, which lets fintech companies embed trading without building a full broker-dealer. In other words, execution is becoming easier to supply, and the competitive question is shifting to information: who gives an individual investor the cleanest view of live quotes, company filings, insider activity and what large institutions are holding.

Share prices across the retail brokerage and investing-app group have been uneven this year, which makes recent operating results more informative than the sector label. This week’s developments, covered below, come from a broker, an exchange operator, a consumer finance app and the platform that distributes many of the apps retail investors use. First, a look at a free tracking dashboard built for that information layer.

Quote Daddy Puts Live Quotes, SEC Filings and Top-Investor 13F Data in One Free Dashboard Covering U.S. and Canadian Markets

• Free to use, with no credit card and no paywalls, according to the Quote Daddy site.

• U.S. stocks and ETFs on NYSE and Nasdaq stream live during market hours, with intraday sparklines on every watchlist row.

• Canadian coverage across TSX, TSX-V and CSE, with Canadian listings delayed by 15 minutes or more, per the app’s FAQ.

• SEC filings and Form 4 insider activity on stock pages, including 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K documents.

• 13F filings from top investors and disclosed congressional trades on the Top Investors page.

Quote Daddy describes itself with a single line: “Every quote that matters, in one clean dashboard.” It is a free stock-tracking application for the web and desktop at app.quotedaddy.com, with iOS and Android apps. It is owned and operated by Market Equities Limited, the parent of this publication, a relationship disclosed in more detail below. Quote Daddy states that it is not a broker-dealer and that nothing in the app is financial, investment, tax or legal advice, which places it on the information side of the sector rather than the trading side.

The tracking layer. The platform’s stock pages combine interactive candlestick charts from one day to the maximum range, five, ten and twenty-day moving averages and volume, live bid and ask spreads with sizes for U.S. stocks, and key fundamentals including market cap, price-to-earnings, earnings per share and dividend yield. Watchlists can be sorted by gainers and losers, carry private notes, sync across devices and be shared by link, and a portfolio view tracks live profit and loss, cost basis and dividends. A markets section covers indices, futures, crypto and top movers. These are the same categories of data the larger brokerage apps compete on, offered here without a subscription.

Filings and institutional positioning. The platform reads SEC filings inside the app and surfaces Form 4 insider transactions on each stock page. Its Top Investors section publishes the latest 13F filings from major fund managers, among them Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, alongside disclosed trades by members of Congress, and lets users import a portfolio into a watchlist in one tap. The site is direct about the limits: 13F filings and congressional disclosures are reported on a delay of roughly 45 days, so figures may be out of date. It also warns that the roughly one-year return figures shown on each profile are rough, illustrative approximations that are not verified, and that nothing on the page is an endorsement by, or affiliation with, any individual named.

AI summaries and sentiment. Quote Daddy adds plain-English explanations of stock moves, daily movement summaries with sector performance context, and retail sentiment drawn from StockTwits. Its FAQ says the briefings “won’t tell you what to buy or sell” and “can occasionally get something wrong,” and that nothing they write is financial advice. Market data is supplied by third parties, including Finnhub, and is provided for informational purposes only.

There are several risks associated with Quote Daddy and with the information in this commentary. Quote Daddy is owned by the same company that owns this publication, which is a conflict of interest and a reason to read this article critically. It is not a broker-dealer, does not execute trades and does not provide advice. Market data is supplied by third parties, may be delayed, and is not guaranteed to be accurate or complete; Canadian quotes are delayed by 15 minutes or more. AI-generated summaries can be wrong, 13F and congressional data are reported with a delay and may be stale, and the one-year return figures on investor profiles are unverified approximations. The retail investing sector is crowded with large, well-funded brokers that also offer free tools, and the market-size forecasts above are projections that may not be realized. Nothing in this article should be used as the basis for an investment decision.

CONTINUED… Read this and more news about Quote Daddy at: quotedaddy.com

In other industry developments and happenings in the market this week include:

Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: IBKR)

Interactive Brokers reported September 2026 metrics on October 1, with 4.111 million daily average revenue trades, 6% higher than a year earlier and 4% lower than August, and 5.576 million client accounts, 35% higher than a year earlier. Ending client equity was $964.7 billion, 27% higher than a year earlier and about even with the prior month, and client margin loan balances were $105.2 billion, up 36%. The average commission per cleared commissionable order was $2.57. The figures are listed on the Company’s investor relations press release page.

On September 15, Interactive Brokers announced an integration with X Cashtags that it said “gives US investors a direct path from following stock and crypto conversations on X to trading on Interactive Brokers.” New U.S. clients who open and fund a qualifying account through the Cashtags experience receive $100, and the feature is currently available to U.S.-based investors only. The release notes that the Company serves over 5 million client accounts worldwide.

Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe BZX: CBOE)

Cboe reported August 2026 trading volume on September 3, with average daily volume of 14,801 thousand contracts in multi-listed options, 5,743 thousand contracts in index options and 1,481 million matched shares in U.S. equities on-exchange. It said its mini-SPX (XSP) options set a monthly ADV record of 241 thousand contracts, eclipsing the previous record set in July.

In its second quarter results on July 31, Cboe reported total revenues of $1,442.8 million and net revenue of $731.6 million, up 25%, with diluted EPS of $3.35, up 50%, and adjusted diluted EPS of $3.56, up 45%. Options net revenue was a record $473.9 million, and the Company raised its 2026 organic net revenue growth target to “mid to high teens.” Its materials also describe the divestiture of its Canadian business, and Cboe Canada is one of the venues whose delayed quotes Quote Daddy lists, so the ownership of that feed may change.

Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ)

Block’s second quarter 2026 shareholder letter reported gross profit of $3.17 billion, up 25% year over year, with Cash App gross profit of $1.97 billion, up 31%, and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.02, up 65%. Cash App primary banking actives grew 17% year over year to 9.4 million. The Company raised its 2026 outlook to gross profit of $12.51 billion and adjusted diluted EPS of $4.02.

Block also said Cash App expanded stablecoin support through an integration with USDC, while its bitcoin ecosystem gross profit declined 31% year over year after a deliberate decision to lower the fee charged on certain bitcoin transactions. Block did not report investing-specific figures in the letter, and Cash App is a consumer money app rather than a stock-tracking product.

Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)

Apple reported fiscal third quarter 2026 revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16% year over year, and diluted EPS of $2.02, up 29%, which included a $0.11 favorable impact from tariff refunds. Services net sales were $30.739 billion, compared with $27.423 billion a year earlier. The Company called it its strongest June quarter ever in its results release.

On June 4, Apple said the App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025 and saw over 850 million average weekly users across 175 countries and regions. Apple did not break out finance or investing apps. Its App Store announcement is relevant to this sector only because the App Store is a main way retail investing apps reach iPhone users.