Eleven Percent More Trades: What Wrist-Worn Market Alerts Do to Retail Behavior

A broker's smartwatch launch reopens a question the industry first tested in 2015: whether always-on price alerts are a monitoring convenience or a channel that lifts trading frequency.

On July 8, 2026, ThinkMarkets released a ThinkTrader smartwatch companion for Apple Watch and Wear OS, pushing price alerts, synced watchlists and live market data to the wrist while keeping order entry in the phone app. The format is not new. IG Group launched Apple Watch trading in 2015 and withdrew it around 2017 for low use. What changed is the economics. Activity-linked revenue models reward trade frequency, and a UK Financial Conduct Authority experiment with more than 9,000 people found push notifications raised the number of trades 11% and the share of trades in risky investments 8%. Plus500 reported revenue per active client of $3,268 in FY2025, up from $3,023 a year earlier.