Retail FXand CFD trading activity continued to expand in the first quarter of 2026. Fiveseparate brokers in FM Intelligence report show monthly trading volumes above$1.5 trillion, and for the first time on records, the top-ranked broker in thecohort crossed the $2 trillion mark.A Larger Active ClientBaseActiveclient accounts across the brokers covered by the FM Intelligence reached 7.42million by the end of Q1 2026, up 9.4% from 6.78 million in Q4 2025 and up42.4% from 5.21 million in Q1 2025. Accounttotals across the cohort have risen in each of the last four quarters,continuing the multi-year trend captured in the recent comparison of Q4 2021 against Q42025, in which active accounts had already doubled across the named-brokertracker.Theexpansion of the active account base has run alongside the growth in tradingvolumes, though account counts and trading volumes do not move in lockstep.Several brokers in the top tier of the volume ranking sit outside the top tierof the account ranking, and the reverse also holds, reflecting different clientmixes and average trade sizes across the industry.Volumes Roughly DoubleYear-Over-YearAggregatemonthly trading volumes rose roughly 13% quarter-over-quarter in theheadline industry total reported by FM Intelligence. Within thenamed-broker cohort tracked individually, monthly volumes are running roughlytwice their Q1 2025 levels a year ago. The pace continues a multi-yearacceleration: the Retail Intensity Ratio frameworkintroduced earlier this year showed retail CFD daily turnover rising from 2.7% of BIS-reportedglobal FX volume in Q4 2020 to 14.1% by Q4 2025.What's in the Full Q1 2026AnalysisThe Q1 2026retail volumes analysis on the FM Intelligence DataLab Portal covers the fullbroker-by-broker volume ranking with quarter-over-quarter and year-over-yearchange for every tracked firm, the active accounts ranking, average monthlyvolume per account, MT4 and MT5 platform share trends across four quarters, andthe underlying methodology and cohort definitions.Auxiliarymetrics covering mobile versus desktop volume share, the most-traded instrumentcategories, and the FX versus non-FX volume mix are also included.Readthe full Q1 2026 retail volumes analysis on the FM Intelligence DataLab Portal→This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.