UK trading houses: two oil desks book the turnover, the toll booths make the money

About 191 UK securities- and commodity-trading companies publish a full profit-and-loss, booking £79.1bn of combined turnover — and roughly 80p in every pound of it belongs to just two oil desks, which keep almost none of it. Glencore Energy UK turns £43.3bn of oil and gas cargoes into a £14.6M loss; IG Markets turns £234M of retail derivatives dealing into £112.3M of profit — in just seven months’ trading. That inversion is the whole map: in this corner of the City, the flow is worth billions and earns nothing, while the toll booths — the platforms, exchanges, clearers and brokers that charge the flow for passing through — run 30–60% margins. Figures are approximate — verify against a company’s own accounts before relying on any single number.

One market, three meanings of turnover

Before reading any table below, know that “turnover” is not one number here — it is three different accounting regimes wearing the same label:

• Physical commodity traders (Glencore Energy UK, Aramco Trading) book the full invoice value of every cargo — the barrel, not the margin. Their tens of billions are gross flow; their real economics live in a spread measured in fractions of a percent.
• Bank dealing arms (Morgan Stanley & Co. International) report something closer to net trading income — gains minus losses, plus fees. Billions of turnover here means something entirely different from billions of cargo.
• Brokers, platforms and exchanges (IG, StoneX, the London Metal Exchange) book commissions, spreads and fees — the only definition where margin means what you think it means.

Never rank these against each other on raw turnover — the giants table below is ordered that way only to show how misleading it is. Two other health warnings. First, a large slice of this map is fund managers, not dealers — T. Rowe Price, M&G, two Fidelity entities, Janus Henderson, Insight and others sit here through quirks of registration; their fee economics belong beside our fund management map. Second, several of the biggest names in UK trading are missing: the giant market makers (XTX, Jane Street, Citadel Securities, Optiver) and most retail platforms (CMC, Trading 212, Plus500) publish their numbers through companies classified elsewhere. This is one corner of the City, not the whole Square Mile.

The giants

…and 162 more with published turnover.

*Morgan Stanley & Co. International is one entity within a global group, and its turnover line is a net trading-income figure sitting on a vast balance sheet — treat the scale as indicative rather than comparable with anything else in the table. Its books are kept in US dollars ($7,575M net revenues, $1,959M PBT); the +15% is the dollar move.

Read down the profit column and the ranking inverts. Glencore Energy UK loses £14.6M on £43.3bn of flow; Aramco Trading keeps £134.3M of £20.7bn — about 65p per £100 of cargo. Morgan Stanley’s dealing arm, meanwhile, earned £1.47bn before tax — roughly £1 of every £3 of profit on this map. And five of the twelve are fund managers who don’t deal at all.

Just below the table sit the businesses that define the sector’s real economics. IG Markets made £112.3M on £234M of retail CFD-dealing revenue — and those figures cover only a seven-month period, after the group moved its year-end from May to December. Its last full twelve months (to May 2025) were a record £177.0M of profit on £385.9M of revenue, so on a run-rate basis profits are still climbing, not falling. AJ Bell Securities, the dealing arm of the investment platform, made £96.7M on £201.1M, growing 21% with 718 full-time staff charged to the company (staff are employed at group level; the wider AJ Bell group averages 1,505). The London Metal Exchange itself — the toll booth’s toll booth — made £96.2M on £219.4M. And Hudson River Trading Europe, the UK outpost of the American proprietary-trading firm, is the strangest line on the map: 26 staff, £50.9M of turnover, and £81.0M of pre-tax profit — profit exceeds turnover because the group tops up the UK entity with a £53M net intercompany service fee plus £16M of interest income. Read it as group arithmetic, like the Interactive Brokers and CLSA margins below, not as a trading machine that out-earns its own revenue line. Its staff costs alone run over £1M per head.

The shape of the market

This is one of the most profitable maps we have drawn. Once a firm clears £5M of revenue, profitability jumps to ~80% and stays there — 89% in the £100M–1bn band. The struggling tier is the sub-£1M tail, where only half make money: small advisory boutiques and dormant-adjacent dealing vehicles. The median margin across the map is about 9% — but as the section above should have convinced you, the median of three different accounting regimes is a number to hold lightly.

The toll booths — and how to read a 60% margin

The best-margin operators in the £5–100M band split into three kinds, and the headline margins mean different things for each. Exchange and venue economics (Cboe Europe, 60.6%; BrokerTec Europe, 23.0%) are genuinely fat — matching engines scale without headcount (though even Cboe’s headline is flattered: about £6.9M of its profit is a dividend from its Dutch subsidiary, and its operating margin is nearer 52%). Group-structure artefacts are fat on paper: Interactive Brokers (U.K.) shows a 73.6% margin and CLSA (UK) 62.1%, but both are local arms of global groups where revenue lands in London and much of the cost sits elsewhere — read those as intra-group arithmetic, not standalone operating skill. And broking proper earns its keep in the teens-to-thirties: TP ICAP Markets at 29.7% with just 49 staff, Axi Financial Services at 22.1%, Square Global at 18.4%, Trade Nation at 16.3%.

*Margins above ~50% at non-exchanges are usually group arithmetic — revenue booked in the UK entity while group functions carry cost elsewhere — rather than what an independent firm could earn.

We’ve made two edits to the raw ranking: a Glencore group vehicle (£27.0M at a 49% margin — intra-group trading, not a market participant) is excluded, and note that five of the names above are fund managers whose fee economics belong on our fund management map. One name just above this band deserves its own asterisk: Aberdeen Platform books £152.6M of income and £147.6M of profit — a 97% ratio no trading business earns. Treat that as group plumbing until its accounts say otherwise. The quiet veteran here is Amalgamated Metal Trading — one of the last ring-dealing members of the metal exchange, 47 staff, 59% margin — a reminder that the oldest toll booths still collect.

Growth, read with care

Trading revenue breathes with the market, so treat every growth number here with more suspicion than usual — a great year for volatility is not a strategy. The genuine expansion story is Revolut Trading: +49% revenue, headcount up 133%, and profitable — the share-dealing arm of the banking app building out a real brokerage. Multi Asset Solutions (+92%, staff +83%) and Rhodon Investment Management (+51%, staff +100%, at a 49% margin) show the same hiring-backed pattern at smaller scale. The rest is mostly lumpy or mechanical: Marex Prime Services grew 88% while cutting staff 22% and swinging from £266k to £15.1M of profit — a step-change that reads like business moved within the Marex group rather than organic wins; Savills Capital Advisors (+111%) earns deal-driven advisory fees that can halve as fast as they doubled; Pacific Capital Partners bought 61% growth at a small loss.

Market structure: the 90% that isn’t there

On paper this is the most concentrated market we have mapped: the top five firms hold 90.0% of combined turnover. In practice that number is an accounting artefact. Glencore Energy UK and Aramco Trading book gross cargo values and between them account for £64bn — 80% of the map — while earning less before tax combined (£119.7M) than IG Markets earned in its last full twelve months (£177.0M). Strip the gross-bookers out and what remains is a broad, genuinely competitive middle: dozens of brokers, venues and desks in the £25M–£300M band, none dominant.

Old money, young platforms

The biggest founding cohort is the 2000s (55 of 191) — the electronic-trading build-out that produced IG Markets’ current vehicle, Cboe’s European venue and the first wave of retail platforms. But 37 firms predate 1990, including broking lineages that go back a century, and they are disproportionately the toll booths that still earn today. Only 13 companies have been incorporated since 2021 — new trading ventures mostly launch under other classifications, or not in the UK. Ownership splits 97 corporate / 79 individual, and only about 4% carry a Holdings/Bidco-style name: private equity, so visible on our other maps, has little grip on a sector where the real assets are regulatory permissions and partner relationships.

What the map shows

1. Turnover means three different things here. Gross cargo values, net trading income and fee income all wear the same label — 80% of the £79.1bn headline is two oil desks’ gross bookings. Never rank across the models.
2. The toll booths out-earn the flow. IG Markets and AJ Bell’s dealing arm made £209M between them on £435M of revenue — and IG’s slice covers only seven months, so a comparable year is nearer £290M; Glencore Energy UK and Aramco Trading made £119.7M on £64bn.
3. Morgan Stanley’s dealing arm is the profit giant — £1.47bn before tax, roughly £1 of every £3 of profit on the map — though its figures are one entity of a global group and not comparable with anything else here.
4. Above £5M of revenue, almost everyone makes money — 78–89% profitable across the mid and upper bands. The industry’s graveyard is the sub-£1M boutique tail.
5. A 60%+ margin is a structure, not a skill. Exchanges genuinely earn it; at brokers’ local arms it is usually revenue booked in London with costs carried elsewhere. Honest broking runs in the teens to thirties.
6. The famous names are elsewhere. The big market makers and most retail platforms publish through companies classified outside this map — and a fifth of the map’s giants are really fund managers, covered in our fund management report.

Methodology and caveats

This covers only the 191 UK securities- and commodity-trading companies that publish a full profit-and-loss; many dealing businesses file abridged accounts with no revenue figures, and several of the best-known UK trading names — the large market makers, most retail platforms, and the interdealer groups’ other entities — are classified elsewhere and appear in other maps instead. Turnover follows each firm’s own accounting: physical traders book gross cargo values, bank dealing arms report net trading-style income, and brokers book fees — the combined £79.1bn mixes all three and overstates any economic notion of the market’s size. Several of the largest desks (the oil traders, Morgan Stanley, the LME) keep their books in US dollars; figures are converted to sterling at a uniform rate of about $1.34/£ — a recent spot rate a few percent above the 2024 period-average, so sterling levels for dollar filers are slightly understated — and year-on-year moves partly reflect exchange rates. Figures are each company’s latest filed accounts, with year-ends ranging from September 2024 to December 2025 — in a volatility-driven sector the vintage matters; IG Markets’ latest accounts cover a seven-month period after a year-end change, flagged where its figures appear. Local arms of global groups can show margins flattered (or depressed) by intra-group recharges, and profit at proprietary-trading entities can sit outside the turnover line entirely. Trading revenue is volatility-driven — single-year growth or decline is weather, not climate. Figures are approximate and business-model labels are directional — verify any specific figure against the company’s own accounts. This is analysis, not financial advice.