Playbook
How to turn a trading Discord into a business
Most trading communities monetise twice: a subscription, and a partner link. The second one is usually worth more than the first, and it is the one most community owners set up last.
The two revenues, and why the order matters
A paid tier charges the member for access. It is predictable, it is yours, and it caps out at what your audience will pay per month. A partner arrangement pays you a share of what your members generate when they trade. It is less predictable, it has no ceiling that you control, and it grows with the member rather than with the subscription price.
The mistake is treating them as alternatives. They are complements, and they pull in the same direction: anything that keeps a member engaged and trading well raises both. That is the whole argument for owning a platform rather than a chat channel.
What a chat group gives you
Reach, immediacy and a sense of a room. It also gives you no member record, no retention data, no way to gate content by tier, no history a new member can read, and no way to know which members actually opened an account. Every one of those is something you need to run this as a business.
What a platform adds
A member list you own, tiers with a paywall, content that persists and gets found, journaling and analytics that give a member a reason to come back daily, and attribution that tells you which member came from where. The chat stays. It stops being the whole product.
What the white-labelled platform includes
Under your brand, on your domain, with your tiers.
- A newsdesk your members read instead of scrolling for headlines
- Options flow and market data panels
- Trade journaling, so a member records what they did and why
- Performance analytics on their own journal, which is the feature that produces the daily return visit
- Watchlists and shared setups
- Member tiers with a paywall
- Discord and Telegram synchronisation, so the room you already have keeps working
- Contract to members logging in
- 14 days from contract to members logging in
- Trading platforms your members can use
- MT4, Introbroker Terminal and TradingView
- Broker choice
- Several regulated brokers. The trader picks at signup and can switch later.
How the trading side pays
Members who open an account do it through your own tracking link, so they are attributed to you permanently. From then on you are paid a share of what the broker relationship earns on their trading, on every trade they close, for as long as they keep trading. Not once when they sign up.
Your members get something out of it directly as well, which is the part that makes this an easy thing to announce rather than an awkward one: cashback on the spread they pay, credited to their trading account every month, with nothing to claim.
- Your share
- 50% to 85%
- Of what
- what Introbroker receives on the account
- What your members get
- 5%
- How they get it
- Credited to the trading account monthly, automatically
- When you are paid
- Weekly, Monday 08:00 CEST
Designing member tiers that people stay in
Step 1 of 4. Keep a genuinely useful free tier
It is your acquisition channel and your credibility. A free tier that is obviously crippled converts worse than one that is genuinely useful, because nobody upgrades from something they have stopped opening.
Step 2 of 4. Put the recurring value behind the paid tier, not the one-off value
A course is bought once. A daily briefing, a journal review or a live session is a reason to still be subscribed in month six. Price the recurring thing.
Step 3 of 4. Make the top tier about access, not more content
The people who pay the most are not asking for more material. They are asking for a smaller room.
Step 4 of 4. Measure retention per tier, from the first month
The tier with the worst retention is usually the one priced closest to the tier below it. You cannot see that without the data, which is the argument for a platform over a chat group in one sentence.
The compliance you cannot skip
Running a paid trading community puts you in scope for rules you may not have thought about. Two matter immediately. First, the moment you promote a trading account you are communicating a financial promotion, and there are requirements about risk warnings and about not presenting past performance as an indication of future results. Second, you now hold member data, which means a privacy notice, a lawful basis and a retention position, not a page copied from another site.
Neither is difficult, and both are much cheaper to get right at the start than to retrofit once you have several thousand members and a payment processor asking questions.
Questions
How long does it take to get a community platform live?
Fourteen days from contract to members logging in, under your own brand. The work on your side is the brand assets, the domain and deciding the tier structure.
Do I have to shut down my Discord or Telegram?
No. Both synchronise with the platform. The room you already have keeps working, and the platform adds the things a chat channel cannot do: a member record, tiers, persistent content, journaling and analytics.
What do my members get out of opening an account through my link?
Cashback on the spread they pay, credited to their trading account every month, automatically, with no volume condition and nothing to claim. They also choose which regulated broker they open with, and they can switch later.
What does the platform cost?
It is agreed per community rather than published as a price list, because it depends on the size and shape of what you are running. Ask for the terms in writing before you sign.
Where this comes from
Sources
Primary sources only: the regulator, the standards body, the platform vendor, the legislation, or our own agreements. Not another affiliate's summary of one.
- Our own documentIntrobroker
Introbroker partner agreementnot published
The commercial terms on this page in their contractual form: the rate, the denominator, the clawback position and the payout schedule. Sent before you sign.
- LegislationOfficial Journal of the European Union
Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation
The lawful basis for server-side attribution, which is performance of the partner contract rather than consent, and the data minimisation rule behind the click log retention.
- RegulatorFinancial Conduct Authority
Conduct of Business Sourcebook, COBS
What a firm communicating a financial promotion has to say, and how an inducement paid to an introducer is treated.