Forget ‘what should I trade? ‘The new question is ‘who should I trust?’
Tag Markets’ rapid expansion offers a window into a bigger shift in retail trading: the rise of platforms where psychology, technology and trust increasingly matter as much as the trade itself
22 October, 2026
TT
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There is an uncomfortable paradox emerging in the world of retail trading. A person may spend hours hesitating over whether to buy or sell a currency pair, second-guessing an entry point or worrying about getting a trade wrong. Yet that same person can be perfectly comfortable selecting a trader they have never met and allowing that trader’s strategy to be replicated automatically in their own account.
The question is no longer simply: What should I trade? Increasingly, it is: Whom should I trust?
That shift is helping fuel the rise of copy trading, a model that is gaining attention across an increasingly digital financial ecosystem. For a global trading industry shaped by international capital, ambitious entrepreneurs and a growing appetite for technology-driven financial services, the phenomenon offers an intriguing glimpse into how people are changing their relationship with markets.
TAG Markets, an international forex and CFD brokerage that began in Colombia in 2023, is one company riding that shift. The brokerage says it has grown into one of the world’s 10 fastest-growing forex brokerages, with more than $1bn in client deposits and a pace of growth that it says is approaching 10,000 new deposits a day.
But the numbers, impressive as they are, tell only part of the story. The more interesting story is what happens when technology changes the psychological burden of making a financial decision.
From Colombia to the world
When TAG Markets was conceived in 2023, the company was entering an industry that was hardly short of competitors. “There was not a shortage of brokers.
The market was already crowded,” Craig Lund, CEO of TAG Markets, said. The opportunity, he argues, was elsewhere.
“A large number of brokerages were offering access to the same markets through similar platforms, similar account structures and, in many cases, similar third-party or white-label infrastructure,” Lund said.
The company’s thesis was that the next phase of competition would be less about simply offering access to forex and CFDs and more about improving what happens around the trade itself.
Onboarding, funding, account management, copy trading, education and partner infrastructure were all areas where the company believed technology could remove friction.
“What began in Colombia in August 2023 has since developed into an international brokerage serving clients across multiple markets,” Lund said.
The underlying idea, he added, was not to create another brokerage offering the same basic service.
“It was created around the idea that a brokerage could remain fundamentally focused on forex and CFD trading while improving the technology, products and systems surrounding the client journey,” he said.
That approach led to products including CopyX, its copy-trading platform, alongside its own infrastructure for introducing brokers.
The distinction is important because copy trading is not really about eliminating decision-making. It changes where the decision is made.
When the trader becomes the product
For a conventional trader, the sequence is familiar. Analyse the market. Choose an instrument. Decide whether to enter. Determine the position size. Manage the trade. Decide when to exit. Every step requires a judgement call. Copy trading rearranges that equation. Instead of attempting to make every decision independently, a client can evaluate another trader’s strategy and decide whether to follow it.
“Technology can make copy trading faster, simpler, and more transparent, but it cannot make the decision for the client,” Lund said.
That distinction gets to the heart of the psychology behind the trend. The person using copy trading has not stopped making a financial decision. They have made a different one. They are choosing a person, a strategy and a level of risk rather than choosing an individual trade. “Trust in financial markets is rarely built from one number,” Lund said. “People look at track record, behaviour over time, drawdowns, consistency, communication, and how comfortable they feel with the level of risk being taken.” That makes the trader being followed almost as important as the technology facilitating the trade. And it introduces a question that is deeply human: why can trusting someone else sometimes feel easier than trusting ourselves?
Part of the answer may be the burden of responsibility
When people trade independently, every loss can feel personal. A losing trade can become a referendum on their judgement. Following another strategy can create psychological distance from that pressure. But that distance should not be confused with reduced financial risk. “A client is still participating in financial markets,” Lund said. “What changes is the way that person chooses to participate.”
The business of trust
For a platform such as CopyX, technology is therefore only half the proposition. The other half is trust. “When someone chooses a trader to follow, they are effectively saying, ‘I am comfortable allowing this person’s decisions to influence what happens inside my account,’” Lund said. That is a remarkably significant transaction between two people who may never meet.
The follower may know little about the trader personally. Instead, trust has to be constructed digitally through performance histories, strategy information, risk indicators, behaviour and consistency.
This is where copy trading begins to resemble a broader trend across financial services.
Consumers routinely delegate decisions to specialists. Investors use fund managers. Wealthy clients employ advisers. Businesses outsource functions they do not want to handle themselves.
Copy trading applies a related idea to retail trading: you do not necessarily need to become the expert if you can identify someone whose strategy you are prepared to follow. But unlike traditional delegation, copy trading can make the relationship unusually immediate. The follower can see a strategy, select it and potentially have its trades replicated in their own account. That convenience is part of the attraction.
So is education.
“Education can come from observing how another trader approaches the market,” Lund said.
The follower can potentially learn not only from outcomes but from patterns of behaviour, risk-taking and market participation.
Yet TAG Markets says it is careful not to frame copy trading as a shortcut around risk. “The technology removes friction from the process, but it does not remove the need for judgement,” Lund said.
More capital, more consequences
The same tension appears in the company’s other products. TAG Markets has developed account structures such as Amplify around giving traders greater flexibility and access to capital. But greater exposure creates a corresponding question: how much risk does the user actually understand?
“The boundary is information, suitability, and control,” Lund said. A larger account does not automatically translate into a better result. Greater exposure can make relatively small market movements more consequential, particularly where leverage is involved. That creates a delicate balancing act for financial platforms. Experienced traders may want flexibility. Less experienced traders may see a larger account primarily as an opportunity without fully appreciating how quickly losses can develop.
“Our responsibility is to make the structure clear enough that the client understands both sides of that equation,” Lund said. For TAG Markets, that means making account conditions, drawdown limits and exposure parameters visible rather than burying them behind the appeal of a larger headline account. The company’s position is that empowerment comes from giving users choices while making the trade-offs attached to those choices equally clear. That philosophy also helps explain its investment in education.
The rise of the digitally native trader
The focus on MENA, Asia and Africa is not accidental. Lund argues that these markets can offer fertile ground for digital financial services because consumers are often quick to adopt technology that solves an obvious problem.
“In many parts of MENA, Asia, and Africa, consumers are comfortable using their phones for payments, banking, investing, communication, and commerce,” he said.
That expectation can carry over into financial markets.
Users accustomed to instant digital payments and app-based services may be less willing to tolerate complicated onboarding, fragmented platforms or opaque account structures. Global financial centres and increasingly connected markets sit naturally within that story.
Cities such as Dubai have built international identities around finance, entrepreneurship, technology and cross-border business. They are also meeting points for capital and increasingly digital-first consumers from across MENA, Asia and Africa.
For brokerages, that creates an audience that may be less interested in how long a financial company has existed and more interested in whether its technology works.
“Clients in these regions are not necessarily impressed by the fact that a company has been operating for a long time,” Lund said.
“They are more interested in whether the platform works well, whether the technology is easy to use, whether funding and withdrawals are efficient, whether support is accessible, and whether the products make sense for the way they want to participate in the market.”
That is a significant change in the competitive landscape.
Education as a business strategy and a responsibility
That is why TAG Markets says it has invested in free educational resources, including video courses, practical articles and live trading sessions.
“Forex and CFD trading involve real risk,” Lund said. “Giving someone access to a platform without giving them the tools to understand volatility, leverage, drawdown, position sizing, and market behaviour is not enough.”
It is a commercially interesting position. Education can help a brokerage differentiate itself. But it can also serve as a test of whether a financial platform is willing to make its products understandable rather than simply attractive.
“The objective is not to tell people what to trade,” Lund said. “It is to help them understand the environment they are participating in so they can make more informed decisions for themselves.”
That philosophy circles back to the original paradox. Copy trading does not remove responsibility. Nor does technology eliminate uncertainty.
Instead, both are changing the shape of the decision. The trader who once asked, “What should I do?” may now ask, “Whose decisions am I prepared to follow?” That is a subtle but consequential shift.
The stranger behind the strategy
Ultimately, the most interesting part of the emerging copy-trading culture may have little to do with algorithms. It is about human behaviour. People have always looked for shortcuts through complexity. They seek specialists, imitate successful behaviour and rely on signals when they lack confidence in their own judgement.
“The more clearly a trader understands the product, the stronger the relationship can become,” Lund said. And in a financial landscape where capital, technology and ambition increasingly intersect, that may become one of the defining questions of the next era of retail trading: not whether people are willing to participate in global markets, but who they are willing to trust when they do.
