XTB has
started letting Polish clients decide exactly which shares or ETFs they sell,
instead of pushing every disposal through the first-in, first-out method, or
FIFO, that has long governed how the country’s brokers calculate taxable gains.
The feature
went live on May 29, and the company says it is the first brokerage in Poland
to offer it.
The pitch
is tax. By choosing the lot they sell, investors get a say in the size of the
gain they realize, and therefore the bill they hand to the tax office.
Poland
taxes capital gains at a flat 19%, the levy known locally as “the Belka tax,” after
Marek Belka, the finance minister who introduced it in 2002. When an investor
buys the same stock in several tranches at different prices and later sells
part of the holding, the cost basis assigned to that sale decides how large the
taxable gain is.
Under FIFO,
the earliest purchases are treated as sold first. On a position that has
climbed over time, those are usually the cheapest shares, which maximizes the
recorded gain and the tax due.
XTB, like other domestic brokers, had been
applying the rule automatically.
Polish law
does let investors identify the actual purchase price of the shares they sell,
so FIFO is a default rather than the only path. Brokers have stuck with it
partly because exchange -listed shares are dematerialized, which makes it hard
to pin down which specific shares left an account.
XTB now
lets clients make that call themselves, or keep FIFO if they prefer.
Routine Abroad, New for
Warsaw
Choosing
tax lots is standard fare in more developed brokerage markets. Interactive
Brokers has long run a tool it calls the Tax Optimizer, which lets clients
override FIFO with last-in first-out, highest-cost, or manually selected lots
across its desktop, mobile, and web platforms.
In the
United States, the IRS permits this so-called specific identification as long
as the investor flags the chosen lot at the time of sale.
Automated
versions have been around for years too. The robo-advisers Betterment and
Wealthfront built tax-loss harvesting, which sells losing lots to offset gains
elsewhere, into their platforms more than a decade ago, with Betterment
launching its tool in 2014.
However, not
every market allows the move. Germany makes FIFO mandatory for securities under
its flat withholding tax, leaving investors no room to pick lots, while the
United Kingdom pools shares of the same class together and applies a 30-day
matching rule meant to stop investors gaming disposals.
Poland’s
FIFO default has sat closer to the German model, which is what makes XTB’s
change notable at home even as it catches up to tools traders elsewhere take
for granted.
XTB’s
version is also narrower than Interactive Brokers’ menu, offering a choice
between manual selection and FIFO rather than a suite of algorithms, and it
works only inside an XTB account.
The broker
has spent the past year extending its options product across
Europe and adding
spot crypto, so a tax feature fits a wider effort to broaden what the platform
does.
What It Changes for
Investors
For active
investors, the tool has real bite. Someone sitting on gains can close a
higher-cost lot to book a loss that offsets earlier profits, or hang on to the
cheapest shares to push that tax into a later year. For a buy-and-hold saver
who rarely trims positions, it changes little.
Omar Arnaout, CEO of XTB, Source: LinkedIn
Omar
Arnaout, XTB’s chief executive, tied the launch to client demand.
“Investors have been asking us about the ability to manage individual
positions for a long time,” he said, adding that the company moved ahead
“after external tax consultations” confirmed the approach was
workable.
He also
described XTB as “setting standards for the entire sector,” a framing
the company applied to its own product.
XTB paired
the announcement with a claim that more
than one in three investors in Poland now holds an account with it, which
is confirmed by the latest KDPW data.
XTB has
been drawing new traders onto the
platform at pace,
counting more than 2.16 million clients globally at the end of 2025. The tax
feature also has limits worth noting: it optimizes only within a single XTB
account, since each broker issues its own annual tax statement, and FIFO stays
in place as the fallback.
A Product Push Backed by
Heavy Marketing
XTB rolled
out the change during an unusually strong stretch of results. The Warsaw-listed
broker reported first-quarter net profit of
PLN 535 million, up
176% from a year earlier, on operating income of PLN 1.09 billion.
That growth
has been bought, in part, with marketing . XTB lifted its marketing spend by close
to 70% in 2025 to
PLN 584.9 million and added 864,000 accounts during the year, a 73% jump. It
has also kept regulators busy at home, absorbing a record fine from
Poland’s KNF that
investors largely shrugged off.
The wider
point is that all the maneuvering around FIFO stems from how Poland’s capital
gains levy was built. The tax arrived as a temporary measure more than two
decades ago and has outlasted repeated talk of reform.
Until the
finance ministry reworks it, brokers competing for Polish savers are left to
engineer their own workarounds, and XTB has now turned one of them into a
selling point.
XTB has
started letting Polish clients decide exactly which shares or ETFs they sell,
instead of pushing every disposal through the first-in, first-out method, or
FIFO, that has long governed how the country’s brokers calculate taxable gains.
The feature
went live on May 29, and the company says it is the first brokerage in Poland
to offer it.
The pitch
is tax. By choosing the lot they sell, investors get a say in the size of the
gain they realize, and therefore the bill they hand to the tax office.
Poland
taxes capital gains at a flat 19%, the levy known locally as “the Belka tax,” after
Marek Belka, the finance minister who introduced it in 2002. When an investor
buys the same stock in several tranches at different prices and later sells
part of the holding, the cost basis assigned to that sale decides how large the
taxable gain is.
Under FIFO,
the earliest purchases are treated as sold first. On a position that has
climbed over time, those are usually the cheapest shares, which maximizes the
recorded gain and the tax due.
XTB, like other domestic brokers, had been
applying the rule automatically.
Polish law
does let investors identify the actual purchase price of the shares they sell,
so FIFO is a default rather than the only path. Brokers have stuck with it
partly because exchange -listed shares are dematerialized, which makes it hard
to pin down which specific shares left an account.
XTB now
lets clients make that call themselves, or keep FIFO if they prefer.
Routine Abroad, New for
Warsaw
Choosing
tax lots is standard fare in more developed brokerage markets. Interactive
Brokers has long run a tool it calls the Tax Optimizer, which lets clients
override FIFO with last-in first-out, highest-cost, or manually selected lots
across its desktop, mobile, and web platforms.
In the
United States, the IRS permits this so-called specific identification as long
as the investor flags the chosen lot at the time of sale.
Automated
versions have been around for years too. The robo-advisers Betterment and
Wealthfront built tax-loss harvesting, which sells losing lots to offset gains
elsewhere, into their platforms more than a decade ago, with Betterment
launching its tool in 2014.
However, not
every market allows the move. Germany makes FIFO mandatory for securities under
its flat withholding tax, leaving investors no room to pick lots, while the
United Kingdom pools shares of the same class together and applies a 30-day
matching rule meant to stop investors gaming disposals.
Poland’s
FIFO default has sat closer to the German model, which is what makes XTB’s
change notable at home even as it catches up to tools traders elsewhere take
for granted.
XTB’s
version is also narrower than Interactive Brokers’ menu, offering a choice
between manual selection and FIFO rather than a suite of algorithms, and it
works only inside an XTB account.
The broker
has spent the past year extending its options product across
Europe and adding
spot crypto, so a tax feature fits a wider effort to broaden what the platform
does.
What It Changes for
Investors
For active
investors, the tool has real bite. Someone sitting on gains can close a
higher-cost lot to book a loss that offsets earlier profits, or hang on to the
cheapest shares to push that tax into a later year. For a buy-and-hold saver
who rarely trims positions, it changes little.
Omar Arnaout, CEO of XTB, Source: LinkedIn
Omar
Arnaout, XTB’s chief executive, tied the launch to client demand.
“Investors have been asking us about the ability to manage individual
positions for a long time,” he said, adding that the company moved ahead
“after external tax consultations” confirmed the approach was
workable.
He also
described XTB as “setting standards for the entire sector,” a framing
the company applied to its own product.
XTB paired
the announcement with a claim that more
than one in three investors in Poland now holds an account with it, which
is confirmed by the latest KDPW data.
XTB has
been drawing new traders onto the
platform at pace,
counting more than 2.16 million clients globally at the end of 2025. The tax
feature also has limits worth noting: it optimizes only within a single XTB
account, since each broker issues its own annual tax statement, and FIFO stays
in place as the fallback.
A Product Push Backed by
Heavy Marketing
XTB rolled
out the change during an unusually strong stretch of results. The Warsaw-listed
broker reported first-quarter net profit of
PLN 535 million, up
176% from a year earlier, on operating income of PLN 1.09 billion.
That growth
has been bought, in part, with marketing . XTB lifted its marketing spend by close
to 70% in 2025 to
PLN 584.9 million and added 864,000 accounts during the year, a 73% jump. It
has also kept regulators busy at home, absorbing a record fine from
Poland’s KNF that
investors largely shrugged off.
The wider
point is that all the maneuvering around FIFO stems from how Poland’s capital
gains levy was built. The tax arrived as a temporary measure more than two
decades ago and has outlasted repeated talk of reform.
Until the
finance ministry reworks it, brokers competing for Polish savers are left to
engineer their own workarounds, and XTB has now turned one of them into a
selling point.
