Investors holding accounts with Asia-facing brokers got a useful reality check from the FM Singapore Summit 2026, where a panel on modern trading behaviour made clear that connectivity and user experience have become as commercially decisive as pricing or product range.
The session, staged at the Craft Stage of the Singapore event, featured Edmund Lee, Growth Manager for Singapore at TradingView, and Kenny Wan, Head of Sales at Penguin Securities. Their message: the retail trader of 2026 is more informed, more diversified across asset classes, and considerably less patient with clunky platform experiences than the retail trader of a decade ago.
What the FM Singapore Summit 2026 Panel Actually Said
Lee opened with platform data that put numbers behind the trend. TradingView recorded global user growth of around 10%, while ASEAN growth came in at 15% and Singapore at 19%. He argued those figures point to particularly strong momentum in Southeast Asia, where rising participation is arriving alongside sharper expectations for speed, personalisation, and seamless access across devices.
Wan said the picture matched what Penguin Securities is seeing among its regional clients. ‘These clients are actually quite well-versed and they know what they want to invest in,’ he said, noting that many arrive having already done their own research across equities, bonds, crypto, gold and other instruments before committing capital.
The multi-asset trader was the central figure in the discussion. Lee described platforms evolving into multi-asset ecosystems as global providers bring together CFDs, equities, crypto and futures under one roof. Wan put the point plainly: ‘I think the story really is about diversification and not just focus on one asset class.’
He contrasted that with the more concentrated habits of earlier retail cohorts. Younger and more market-aware investors, he argued, now respond to macro events, rate decisions and geopolitical tension by rotating across products rather than staying anchored to equities alone.
Commodities and the Gold Queue: A Telling Shift
Commodities emerged as a concrete illustration of that broader shift. Lee cited data showing Singapore posting 55% growth in commodities trading, while Wan described clients using instruments such as gold and oil both as defensive hedges and as outright speculative trades.
Wan offered one of the session’s more vivid anecdotes: people in Singapore queueing at banks and bullion dealers to buy physical gold. ‘People are actually buying gold for speculative purposes,’ he said, suggesting the asset class has moved well into the retail mainstream whenever geopolitical stress pushes investors to rethink risk.
That growing appetite for cross-asset access sits inside a market that Grand View Research estimates generated $2,528.5 million in revenue across Asia Pacific’s online trading platform sector in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (the expected pace of expansion year-on-year) of 9.2% projected from 2026, according to Grand View Research.
For UK retail investors eyeing Asia-facing platforms, two details about Penguin Securities are worth noting. The firm holds a Capital Markets Services (CMS) licence (a regulatory authorisation allowing a firm to deal in capital markets products) granted by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) under the Securities and Futures Act 2001, as confirmed on the MAS Financial Institutions Directory. That licence covers dealing in capital markets products.
However, digital asset derivatives are offered by a separate legal entity, Penguin Securities Trading Pte. Ltd., which is not regulated by the MAS, according to the company’s own CMS licence announcement. Investors considering crypto derivatives through any platform should establish clearly which entity they are contracting with and whether it carries regulatory protection.
Both speakers agreed on the competitive conclusion: brokers that cannot connect analysis tools to execution smoothly will struggle to retain users who are already accustomed to comparing platforms. As Lee put it, the differentiator between brokers today is connectivity and user experience, not pricing alone.
The next test of that argument will come from rate decisions and geopolitical developments in the months ahead. If macro uncertainty drives another rotation into commodities and safe-haven assets, platforms that let users move between asset classes without friction will be the ones finding out whether their infrastructure matches their marketing.
