Review contents
eToro is one of the best trading and investment platforms out there – it’s easy to use, low cost and has a huge range of investment options to choose from. You’ll even get up to 5.3% on cash in your account. It’s super popular around the world, suited to every type of investor, with a huge community you can get involved with, learn from and copy their trades. 5 stars from us.
Saying eToro is massively popular might be an understatement, eToro is insanely popular, with more than 30 million customers from over 140 countries across the world – it's super popular in the UK, Europe, United States, Australia and more.
Why? Because not only is it low cost, easy to use and has a huge range of investment options, it also makes trading fun, it makes it social.
If you want to, you can chat away with people from across the world about certain stocks or cryptocurrencies, join the community online, get a personalised news feed, share ideas, learn from experienced investors, and even copy their trades! Or if you’re a pro, be an influencer yourself and let people copy your trades, and make some extra money.
As an investment platform, it’s perfect for beginners right through to experienced traders.
For beginners, the community, learning resources and simple to use interface, along with the great support is ideal. You can’t really get a better place to start investing and trading. Or, simply buy and hold investments for as long as you like, for very low cost.
And for advanced traders, the range of investment options and trading features are awesome.
eToro has a huge range of instruments to trade – this means things to trade, such as stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), indices (e.g. a whole stock market), currencies, and cryptocurrencies (more on these later).
It has advanced trading features too, such as trading both price directions, up (long) and down (short), and a fan favourite, leverage trading, which is trading with more money than you have (more on this later too). We’ll explain more about CFDs later – they’re not as confusing as it sounds!
It’s also great for hands-off investors, with 0% commission on stocks and shares (e.g. free to buy), and no fees to hold investments (unlike almost every other stockbroker or investment platform). eToro will even pay your Stamp Duty when you buy UK shares (so you save 0.50%).
You’ll also get one of the highest interest rates out there on cash, up to 5.3% on any cash in your account, so you can still make money even while you’re not invested.
If you’re interested in crypto trading, it’s also one of the few places that offers crypto these days, (and one of the most trusted), and reasonable fees to go with it.
If you've heard enough and are keen to get going, get started on the eToro website¹. Otherwise, let's get into the details!
Yep! It’s one of most user-friendly platforms for investing and trading out there.
It’s super easy to use the platform and make trades, view your portfolio (your assets), and research and find new trades.
Plus, you’ve got the community and social trading features to help you take your first steps into trading and learn about all the various assets and trading options available to you, which you can start using once your confidence grows and you gain experience. We've covered social trading more below.
It’s far better to have a network of experienced people to follow, learn from and talk to than trying to discover and learn everything yourself. Why not learn from the best? And, it makes it way more enjoyable!
Nuts About Money tip: you can also start without risking your own cash if you want to. Here’s where to get started with an eToro demo account¹.
eToro is hugely popular. It's low cost, easy to use, and a huge range of investment options. Great for all types of investors.
Think of your Facebook and Instagram newsfeed (we’re hoping you’re familiar with these!). The eToro Social News Feed is just like that, a personalised news feed, created just for you – with all the investing related content you are interested in.
So, your feed could show the latest news on bitcoin if you’re interested in cryptocurrencies, and what your eToro friends and the community are saying about it. And like Facebook, you can comment and start a conversation with them.
This is a great feature, called CopyTrader.
Imagine a top investor in the world spending their time researching the next best investment, or the ins-and-outs of a certain company and its potential, and how much of their portfolio (total amount of investment money) to invest.
They then make a trade, and buy some shares in a company they believe has a high probability that the price goes higher.
Guess what you can do? Copy them!
You get the benefit of all their wisdom and decision making, without doing any of the hard work (and let’s be honest, we’re probably not going to be anywhere near as good as researching or trading as they are!).
eToro gives you the results and insights of top investors. And guess what? There’s no charge either, it’s all free.
You can easily choose the most popular investors to follow, or search for people trading the assets you like. Then check out their profile with their trade history and automatically copy their trades if you like what you see.
It’s great for the investor you’re copying too. If they’re successful, eToro will pay them a fee on top of their trading profits, and the more people that copy them, the more money they can make.
That was a brief overview, and there's a bit more to it. Learn more about copy-trading on the eToro website¹.
eToro is both a traditional broker, where you can simply buy, hold and sell stocks and shares, and other things like exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and it’s an advanced trading platform…
Don’t panic! That doesn’t mean it only for advanced traders, or those looking to make lots of trades during the day (for low cost). It’s great for that, but it’s pretty much suited to every type of investor out there.
Let’s dive into the trading platform a bit more first. If you’re just interested in buying and holding investments, head over to the eToro website¹ to get started, and eToro will guide you through the process to get set up in just a few minutes.
When you use the platform, it looks and feels like you are buying stocks and other assets that you’d like to trade, and effectively you are, but for most trades, you’ll actually be trading a CFD of the asset, rather than the asset itself. It sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple.
There's not much difference (and you can still buy and hold stocks themselves), but to create all the trading features that makes eToro super popular with traders, they have to use CFDs.
A CFD is a ‘Contract For Differences’. Instead of purchasing an asset, such as a stock or share, you are instead entering into an agreement (a contract) with eToro about the price of that asset instead, and the direction that price is going to take (i.e. go up or go down).
When you decide to close your trade, which means you don’t want to be in the trade any more (such as the asset has hit your price target and you want to take your profit), then at this point the contract with eToro ends and you settle the difference between the price you bought and the price you sold.
They’re great because you can trade both price directions, up and down, so you can actually ‘bet’ that the price of an asset will go down. And you can even use leverage, which is trading with more money than you actually have (more on this below).
Note: leverage is for experienced investors, as you can potentially lose money more rapidly than regular trading.
That was a quick overview, but if you’re keen to learn more or get started, head over to the eToro website¹.
The range of investments (assets) to trade is really good, you’ve got stocks & shares, exchange-traded funds (groups of investments), indices (whole stock exchanges), cryptocurrencies, currencies (foreign exchange) and commodities (real things, such as gold).
Let’s dive into each one:
You can trade nearly 3,000 stocks and shares from all the major industries (such as finance, tech, healthcare) and across all the major stock exchanges across the world (such as the London Stock Exchange, or the New York Stock Exchange). Pretty much every company that people trade regularly is listed, including all the popular brands, such as Apple and Microsoft.
There’s over 50 cryptocurrencies tradeable on eToro. Which is a good range – it’s all the popular and more established coins, such as bitcoin, ethereum, and many more. Even dogecoin! View the full range on the eToro website¹.
However, there are thousands of coins out there, so it’s not a one-stop-shop for all of crypto. If you’re after a wider range of coins, check out the best crypto exchanges.
If you're brand new to crypto and need a helping hand, here's how to buy bitcoin and how to buy ethereum.
Note: new coins are added regularly, once they’ve been reviewed for trustworthiness and volume.
By the way, with crypto on eToro, you are in fact buying the coins directly, you aren’t using CFDs (CFDs on crypto is not allowed in the UK).
Learn more about crypto trading on the eToro website¹.
You can create an eToro wallet and transfer your coins to your own wallet if you want to, rather than them being held in your trading account. This gives you greater protection of your own coins, as they’re under your full control.
You can use the wallet to store other coins that you haven’t bought on eToro too – you’ll get your own wallet address to send your tokens to.
With any wallet in crypto, you’ll get a private key (also known as a seed phrase or secret recovery key). This is your only ability to recover your wallet if you lose access (so keep it safe at home, keep a back up, and don’t store it online).
With an eToro wallet, they’ll actually keep your private key too, so you’ll always have a way of recovering your wallet should you lose access yourself and lose your private keys.
It is very reassuring for a lot of crypto investors, particularly beginners, to have the ability to recover your account and it’s not all on your own shoulders. However, this then adds that extra bit of risk that potentially eToro may have a data breach (hacked) and your keys could be compromised.
Commodities are real things rather than shares, such as gold, silver, oil, gas. They’re popular to trade and the trading volume is huge across the world.
They’re heavily influenced by world events, and changes in government policies across the world, so you can predict price movements and price directions with research from effectively news channels, rather than company-specific research with stocks and shares.
The foreign currency exchange (FX) is hugely popular, in fact it’s the biggest financial market in the world. With eToro you can trade pretty much every currency pair (that’s a market like USD/GBP; swapping Dollars for Pounds).
You can use leverage on currencies, (up to 30x your investment, which is very high). That’s when you can borrow 30x the amount of your capital (money) for a trade, so you can multiply your gains (or losses) with a lower amount of capital, for instance use £100 of your capital to make a trade worth £3,000. However, it’s high risk, so please be sensible.
You can also trade indices, or indexes, which is a stock market itself, such as the FTSE 100 (top 100 UK stocks), or S&P 500 (top 500 US stocks) – it represents all the stocks on the stock market, called an index. This gives you the ability to effectively trade a whole economy, such as the UK economy, and in any direction, up or down.
ETFs are a mix of shares, and sometimes bonds, real-estate and commodities, all packaged up as one fund and tradable on stock exchanges.
They make it far easier for you to trade certain industries, as you can simply buy a share of the ETF rather than shares of all the individual companies. For instance, you can buy an ETF that contains shares from all US technology companies.
You can use leverage with eToro, excited?!
Leverage means trading with more money than you actually have.
You can borrow money from a broker (eToro), using your money as collateral (a deposit). So, for instance, say you want to invest £50 on a share you think is going to go up in price, you could borrow up to 5x that on eToro and make a trade worth £250 (5 x £50 = £250).
Now if the price of the share increases by 10%, you’ve made 10% of £250, which is £25, rather than 10% of your initial £50, which is £5. So, you’ve actually made a 50% return on your money, not bad!
However, if the price goes down 10% instead, you’ve lost 10% of £250, not 10% of your £50. So you would have lost £25 instead of £5, leaving you with a 50% loss on your money.
It’s high risk, high reward. Please use it sensibly!
The leverage allowances are:
In general, eToro is low cost.
There’s actually 0% commission on stocks and ETFs (meaning no set fees to buy or sell). If you were to compare with a traditional stock broker, such as Hargreaves Lansdown, you’d pay as much as £11.95 per investment.
And most importantly, there’s no fees to hold investments at all (excluding CFDs). Making it one of the cheapest platforms out there.
There are other fees here and there (we’ll run through them), and it depends on how you use eToro. The main fee is trading CFDs, it’s still low cost, but there will be spread fees.
If you’re keen to learn more, here’s a list of all the eToro fees¹.
The main way eToro makes money is from the ‘spread’ on the assets you can trade. The spread means the difference between the price offered to you to buy something (for instance a stock), and the price you’d get if you sold it (at the same moment in time). So, effectively eToro pockets the difference.
For instance, let’s say you want to trade Apple shares, and the current price to buy a share is $160. This would mean the price to sell an Apple share would be $159.72, because the spread for Apple is 0.18% (fees below), eToro is making $0.28 per trade ($160 - $159.72 = $0.28).
This means that when you open a trading position (e.g. buying a stock), you’ll start with a loss, as if you were to immediately sell the stock back, you would get the ‘sell’ price from eToro rather than the ‘buy’ price. (Because of the spread, the buy price is higher than the sell price).
The spread varies across what you want to trade, and you’ll only pay the spread when you buy on eToro, not sell. So, spreads appear slightly higher than other brokers, who charge on both buying and selling.
Here’s what you should expect to pay:
If you want a bit more info on exact spread fees, check out the eToro website¹.
With crypto, it's a bit different. You'll pay a fixed 1% transaction fee every time you buy, and every time you sell.
Plus, the spread cost between the current price to buy and the current price to sell. Which is taken from prices on the market from eToro's professional crypto exchange (which unfortunately is reserved for professional traders).
So overall, you'll be paying at least 2% for a trade.
If we compare that with Coinbase, another popular crypto exchange, you’d be paying 1.49% as a transaction fee, to buy or sell, plus the spread fee, which is normally 0.50%. Added together that totals 1.99% per transaction. And when you sold you’d be charged 1.99% again, so close to 4% per trade, nearly double eToro’s 2%.
Deposit fee: you’ll have to pay 0.50% on any deposits that are non-USD. So, if you wanted to deposit £1,000, that would cost you £5. It’s a fee to cover the conversion to Dollars, as everything on eToro is based in Dollars.
Withdrawal fee: there’s a $5 fee for cash withdrawals, and the minimum withdrawal is $30.
Inactivity fee: if you don’t use your account for 12 months, you’ll be charged $10 per month if you have any cash on there.
Overnight fees: there’s a small fee if you keep your CFD position open overnight. This is 3 times more if you leave your position open over the weekend. (There’s no overnight fees on crypto).
Leverage: if you want to use leverage (trade with more money than you have), you’ll be charged a higher fee too.
The customer support is great. There’s a huge ‘help centre’ to solve pretty much any question you might have, and if that doesn’t help, you can create a support ticket which will get solved as soon as possible.
There’s also a live-chat feature for customers who are ‘club’ members, which means you have more than $5,000 in your account.
‘Club’ members also get a dedicated account manager based in the UK who can answer any questions you have, show you how the platform works and explain concepts that you might need help with such as the fee structure. It’s pretty great from an online platform actually.
The support is 24 hours per day during the week, but slows down on the weekends when the markets aren’t open. Everyone needs a break right?
Yep! It’s authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which means they have been approved and are trusted to look after and protect your money. It’s also authorised by every country it operates in around the world.
Customers' money is also held in a protected trust bank account, which is entirely separate from eToro’s business funds. Which means if anything happened to eToro, such as bankruptcy (very unlikely), all of your money is safe and will be returned to you.
Demo account: if you’re not ready to deposit money yet, or might not have too much and still want to trade, you can open a demo account with $100,000 to practice with. All for free!
Fractional shares: some shares are expensive, such as Netflix, which has been around $600. With fractional shares, you can simply buy as much as you’d like in cash terms, and receive a fraction of the share instead. For instance, if you want to spend $100, you’ll get 1/6th of a share, rather than having to buy a whole share (1/6th of $600 = $100).
Mobile app: there’s an awesome mobile app for both Apple and Android devices. Plus the website of course.
ISAs: you can’t open a Stocks & Shares ISA or a SIPP (pension). If you’re looking to invest through an ISA, we’ve reviewed the best Stocks & Shares ISAs.
Everything is in Dollars: get used to trading in Dollars ($), as it’s eToros base currency and all trades are made in Dollars.
Stamp Duty: there’s no Stamp Duty Reserve Tax (SDRT) on any purchases of UK shares, which you’d normally have to pay. eToro pays these fees. How nice! It would have been 0.50% per purchase.
eToro has a great rating on Trustpilot, the popular reviews website. It has a score of 4.4 out of 5, which is high anyway, but for a financial services firm that’s really high.
Most reviews are about awesome customer support and the social features, such as copy trading, along with the platform experience as a whole.
There's a lot going on with eToro, let's summarise with the pros and cons:
We think eToro is an awesome investment platform, and can see why there’s over 30 million customers worldwide.
It’s easy and simple to make investments across a huge range of assets, including crypto. And it’s suited to pretty much every type of investor, from those who just want to buy and hold investments, to those who want to make multiple trades per day.
Plus, it’s got the low fees to suit every investor too. There’s no fees to hold investments, and there’s no commission on stocks and ETFs. There are fees for trading regularly (CFDs), but they’re low overall.
eToro is also unique, it’s got some great social trading features to help you invest better…
You can view what traders are doing from across the world, see how well they are performing, follow them if you like, chat with them – and best of all copy their trades!
You can trade like a pro, while actually being a complete beginner.
Plus, you also have the option to use leverage (trade with more money than you have), and short (trade the price going down), which you won’t find with many other brokers – but be sensible!
And, you can get up to 5.3% interest on your cash. Not bad right?!
It’s an all-in-one trading platform, with great features not found anywhere else. It’s low cost overall, easy to use and a huge range of investment options. It’s a great experience overall, and for that reason we’re giving it 5 stars.
Ready to get investing? Get started on the eToro website¹.
As we’ve written a review, eToro has asked us to let you know, some information before you sign up, so here it is:
eToro is a multi-asset platform which offers both investing in stocks and cryptoassets, as well as trading CFDs.
Please note that CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 76% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.
Past performance is not an indication of future results. Trading history presented is less than 5 complete years and may not suffice as basis for investment decision.
Copy Trading does not amount to investment advice. The value of your investments may go up or down. Your capital is at risk.
eToro USA LLC does not offer CFDs and makes no representation and assumes no liability as to the accuracy or completeness of the content of this publication, which has been prepared by our partner utilising publicly available non-entity specific information about eToro.
Cryptoassets: don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong. Take 2 minutes to learn more.
eToro is hugely popular. It's low cost, easy to use, and a huge range of investment options. Great for all types of investors.
eToro is hugely popular. It's low cost, easy to use, and a huge range of investment options. Great for all types of investors.
eToro is hugely popular. It's low cost, easy to use, and a huge range of investment options. Great for all types of investors.
This article was written by the team at Nuts About Money, and fact-checked by 2 independent reviewers. You’re in safe hands.
eToro is hugely popular. It's low cost, easy to use, and a huge range of investment options. Great for all types of investors.
