Online brokerage tables encounter dark horses, the "Three Swordsmen" reshuffle into the "Four Powerhouses" competition

21st Century Business Herald Reporter Liu Xiafei

As the 2025 annual reports are gradually disclosed, the latest “battle results” of the four internet brokerage giants: Oriental Fortune, Tonghuashun, Great Wisdom, and Guidepost, are all unveiled.

In the hot market, all four companies achieved positive revenue growth, but the gap in profitability continues to widen. The “Four Strong” companies are on stage together, yet they are already in different development quadrants.

**A “dominant” leader: Oriental Fortune, with a net profit attributable to parent company of 12.09B yuan, far ahead, equivalent to daily earnings of over 33 million yuan. **A “high-profit” runner: **Tonghuashun, with a profit growth rate of 75.79%, achieved a net profit of 3.2B yuan under a lightweight asset model.

A “dark horse” breakthrough: Guidepost’s net profit surged 118.74% year-on-year, ranking first among the four in growth rate, with increased securities business volume helping it make a key leap from a software company to an internet broker. Meanwhile, the former “Three Swordsmen” of Great Wisdom still struggles near the profit and loss line, with an annual loss of 44 million yuan,** but the loss has narrowed by nearly 80% compared to the previous year,** actively working to get out of trouble.

Under performance differentiation, the business logic of the four companies also varies. The contest between “brokerage” and “platform” models, with “chasers” entering one after another, makes the internet brokerage battle increasingly intense.

With AI becoming a new variable in industry competition, who can take the lead in securing the next “winning move” has also become a market focus.

Performance overview:

Oriental Fortune leads, Guidepost breaks through

In 2025, the A-share market saw both volume and price rise, with the Shanghai Composite Index reaching a ten-year high, and the daily average turnover of the two markets surpassing 1.7 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 62%. In this hot market, investor enthusiasm soared, with new A-share accounts opening totaling 27.44 million for the year.

The increase in market activity directly translated into strong demand for trading tools, market information, and other services, driving significant growth in the performance of internet brokerages.

Focusing on the performance of the four internet brokerages—Oriental Fortune, Tonghuashun, Great Wisdom, and Guidepost—in 2025, all four seized market opportunities to achieve positive revenue growth, but there is a clear divergence in profitability.

Specifically, Oriental Fortune, leveraging its scale advantage, remains at the top; Tonghuashun demonstrates strong profit elasticity with a lightweight asset model; Guidepost, through integrated securities business breakthroughs, accelerates both revenue and net profit; while Great Wisdom, despite progress in reducing losses, still struggles to avoid widening the gap with the top three.

In terms of operating income, the four companies show significant stratification. Oriental Fortune’s full-year revenue reached 17k yuan, which is 2.6 times that of Tonghuashun (16.07B yuan), 7.5 times that of Guidepost (6.03B yuan), and more than 19 times that of Great Wisdom (827 million yuan).

Looking at revenue growth rates, Tonghuashun leads with 44%; Guidepost follows with 40.39%; Oriental Fortune’s growth is slightly lower but still achieved 38.46% in a billion-yuan scale; while Great Wisdom only grew by 7.23%, with a widening gap compared to the other three.

Despite overall revenue increases, the profitability of the four companies shows different highlights.

Oriental Fortune’s net profit attributable to parent company reached 2.15B yuan, surpassing the combined net profits of the other three by three times, with a year-on-year increase of 25.75%, demonstrating a strong scale advantage. Tonghuashun exhibits the “small but beautiful” characteristic, with a net profit of 12.09B yuan, but its 75.79% YoY growth far exceeds its revenue growth, fully releasing profit elasticity under a lightweight asset model. Guidepost also performed well, with a full-year net profit of 228 million yuan,** surging 118.74% YoY, making it the fastest-growing in profit among the four.**

In contrast, Great Wisdom still struggles near the break-even point, with a full-year loss of 44 million yuan, but the loss has been significantly reduced by 78.13% compared to the previous year, showing effective loss reduction.

From daily average profitability, it may be more intuitive. In 2025, the four internet brokerages collectively achieved a net profit of 3.2B yuan, averaging about 42.39 million yuan per day. Among them, Oriental Fortune, Tonghuashun, and Guidepost each earned approximately 33.10 million yuan, 8.78 million yuan, and 620k yuan daily, respectively, while Great Wisdom experienced a daily loss of about 120k yuan.

Top-tier showdown:

The divergence of “brokerage” and “platform” paths

Under the performance differentiation driven by scale and growth, the different revenue structures reflect fundamental differences in business logic among the four companies.

This difference is most evident in the two industry “giants”—Oriental Fortune and Tonghuashun. Both originated from financial information service platforms, but now they have taken distinct “brokerage” and “platform” paths, each with unique characteristics.

Holding full securities licenses, Oriental Fortune’s business model is distinctly brokerage-oriented. In 2025, its securities service business contributed 15.47B yuan, accounting for 78.02% of total revenue. This means that for every 100 yuan earned, 78 yuan come from securities services. From this perspective, it is essentially closer to an internet-based brokerage.

Breaking down the business, brokerage is its absolute “pillar.” In 2025, Oriental Fortune’s securities brokerage net revenue was 620k yuan, up 50.30%; margin financing and interest income reached 120k yuan, up 44.27%. These two highly transaction-volume-related businesses form the “ballast” of Oriental Fortune’s revenue in a bull market.

Fund distribution is the second-largest business for Oriental Fortune. Notably, under the background of lowered fund sales commission rates, this business’s “gold content” faces short-term weakening. In 2025, Oriental Fortune’s electronic commerce services (fund distribution) generated 12.54B yuan, accounting for 19.80% of total revenue,** with an 11.99% YoY increase, but significantly lagging behind the 38.51% growth in fund sales.** Meanwhile, competition in fund distribution channels is intensifying. According to Sun Ting, an analyst at Dongwu Securities, the market share of Oriental Fortune’s “Tiantian Fund” in equity holdings declined in the second half of 2025, while Ant Fund and China Merchants Bank’s market shares increased.

In comparison, its financial data services, though smaller in scale, show considerable growth. In 2025, Oriental Fortune’s financial data services revenue was 240 million yuan, less than 1.50% of total revenue, but grew by 25.18%. This business mainly relies on data from intelligent financial data terminals like Choice, providing data services to institutional and individual users.

Unlike Oriental Fortune’s “brokerage” path, Tonghuashun, as the leading “traffic giant,” emphasizes its “platform” attributes, showing typical lightweight, high-margin features.

Advertising and internet promotion services are Tonghuashun’s primary revenue source. In 2025, this segment earned 7.72B yuan, up 70.98%, accounting for 57.43% of total revenue, with a gross margin of 96.09%.

The value-added telecom and software sales segments earned 3.44B yuan and 399 million yuan, respectively, with growth rates of 20.71% and 12.12%,** both with gross margins exceeding 85%, providing stable profit support. These two businesses are similar to Oriental Fortune’s “financial data services,” mainly including paid tools like Level-2 quotes and financial information terminals like iFind.

Behind the “high gross margin” is Tonghuashun’s business logic of “relying on technology and monetizing traffic.” In 2025, Tonghuashun’s app monthly active users averaged 35.49 million, ranking first among securities apps, far ahead of the second and third places—Oriental Fortune (17.43 million) and Great Wisdom (12.09 million). The large user base makes financial institutions willing to pay for promotion to gain user attention; retaining users and ensuring long-term use depends on the platform continuously building a technological “moat.”

“Chaser” competition:

Who is the “next Oriental Fortune”?

If Oriental Fortune and Tonghuashun represent the divergence of “brokerage” and “platform” paths, then Guidepost and Great Wisdom are also entering the “chaser” stage on the “brokerage” route. However, the former has already stepped on the accelerator, while the latter is still waiting for the “green light.”

After acquiring Maigao Securities in 2022, Guidepost completed the acquisition of Pioneer Fund in 2025, further improving its financial ecosystem. From the revenue structure, Guidepost’s current business remains “70% software, 30% securities.” But as Maigao Securities continues to expand, its transformation from a software company to an internet broker is entering the fast lane.

“Software” remains the company’s core. In 2025, Guidepost’s financial information services (originally software sales) achieved 3.18B yuan in revenue, up 27.50%, accounting for about 70.32% of total revenue. This business maintains a high gross margin of 87.22%, serving as both a revenue pillar and an important source of traffic for other businesses.

Securities services are the fastest-growing segment for Guidepost. In 2025, Guidepost’s securities services revenue was 607 million yuan, up 91.19%, accounting for 28.27% of total revenue. Focusing on its subsidiary Maigao Securities, full-year revenue was 757 million yuan, up 55.61%. By the end of 2025, Maigao Securities’ client custody assets (proxy trading funds) exceeded 10 billion yuan, reaching 3.46B yuan, a 52.72% increase from the previous year, with client assets rapidly accumulating.

Unlike Guidepost’s “graceful transformation,” Great Wisdom, once among the “Internet brokerage three swordsmen,” is still exploring and repairing its business model.

From the revenue structure, Great Wisdom’s core remains financial information and data PC terminal services, with 422 million yuan in revenue in 2025, over half of total, up 7.71%, with a gross margin of 59.86%.

The most profitable business is advertising and internet promotion services, with annual revenue of 122 million yuan, up 14.7%, and a gross margin of 98.97%, but accounting for less than 15% of total revenue.

The fastest-growing is mobile terminal services, with 35.45 million yuan in revenue in 2025, up 38.57%, but the scale is still small and insufficient to drive overall growth.

In fact, the narrowing of Great Wisdom’s losses is more about “cost-cutting” than “revenue increase.” In 2025, the company’s period expenses decreased by 8.55% year-on-year, with significant cost reduction and efficiency gains, but revenue growth still falls short of fully covering costs.

Faced with sluggish growth, the market hopes that Xiangcai Shares’ acquisition of Great Wisdom can open a closed loop from information to trading, following the path of Oriental Fortune and Guidepost. However, this “marriage” has been fraught with difficulties—earlier this March, due to the valuation data in the application documents being outdated, the deal was suspended, awaiting updated data before restarting.

Moreover, even if the merger proceeds, Great Wisdom and Guidepost will face a common challenge: when Oriental Fortune transformed, its traffic entry points were already quite mature; but Great Wisdom and Guidepost currently have a less solid traffic foundation and monetization ability, still far behind Oriental Fortune. Therefore, how to find their own rhythm remains the core challenge for the “chasers.”

AI race:

Solving the “next winning move”

Although their business models differ, as internet brokerages, technological capability is always a common foundation.

In terms of R&D investment, Oriental Fortune and Tonghuashun are quite close, both exceeding 1 billion yuan in 2025, with 1.95B and 1.51B yuan respectively. However, Tonghuashun’s R&D expense ratio is 18.99%, much higher than Oriental Fortune’s 6.64%,** indicating Tonghuashun allocates more towards technology expenses.**

Guidepost and Great Wisdom’s R&D investments are below 200 million yuan, at 164 million and 185 million yuan, respectively. Notably, Guidepost is the only one among the four increasing R&D spending, up 1.17% YoY, with an expense ratio of 7.66%. Great Wisdom, actively reducing losses, cut R&D expenses by 16.20%, but its R&D expense ratio remains high at 22.40%.

Regarding the purpose of R&D, AI is undoubtedly the “biggest common denominator.” In the wave of AI, how to empower investment research and decision-making is a must-answer question for internet brokerages. However, each company has its own approach.

Tonghuashun, the most aggressive in technology investment, was the first to explore “all-in AI,” continuously increasing related deployments in recent years. In 2025, Tonghuashun upgraded its “Ask Finance HithinkGPT” large model to an intelligent agent, evolving from a single reasoning model to an autonomous planning reasoning agent. In 2026, Tonghuashun launched the “Tongce HiAlpha Platform,” further supporting “intelligent trading.”

The reporter also noticed that recent job postings at Tonghuashun include positions like “Robot Mechanical Design Engineer” and “Algorithm Engineer—Embodied Intelligence,” with responsibilities including “collaborating closely with mechanical, perception, and AI teams, participating in robot system performance optimization and productization, and promoting algorithm deployment in real scenarios.” Although Tonghuashun has not yet launched robot-related products, these recruitment activities hint at its “further step” exploration.

Oriental Fortune’s AI strategy is closely tied to its “information—community—trading—wealth management” ecosystem, emphasizing deep integration of AI product development and application within core business scenarios. In 2025, Oriental Fortune officially opened its “Miaxiang” large model to all users, empowering its own services, such as embedding intelligent investment advisory functions into platforms like Oriental Fortune Net and Tiantian Fund; and launching “Miaxiang Investment Research Assistant” for institutional research needs.

When asked about the impact of “Miaxiang AI” investment on investors, Oriental Fortune stated that Miaxiang AI capabilities are fully integrated into various products and business lines, rapidly building and improving an intelligent internet wealth management ecosystem, inputting Miaxiang AI capabilities into the entire Oriental Fortune ecosystem, and continuously enhancing the internet wealth management ecosystem.

Compared to the “big spenders”—the two giants—Guidepost and Great Wisdom are currently focusing on “small cuts” to break through, mainly using AI as an auxiliary tool to enhance existing products and operations, while still exploring ecosystem-level product development.

In 2025, Great Wisdom launched “Huiwen,” an AI quantitative strategy function, and “Mingxing AI Investment Research System,” which is also being continuously updated. Guidepost launched “Intelligent Customer Service System,” supporting smart investment research.

In the internet brokerage competition, AI is becoming the core variable in the next round of competition, increasingly recognized as an industry consensus.

Under this consensus, industry insiders point out that the outcome of this race depends not only on the amount of technological investment but also on whether AI can resonate with each company’s business logic. Who can first turn AI capabilities into real user stickiness and revenue growth will take the lead in the next cycle.