eToro

eToro is a well-established broker since 2007. eToro has headquarters in Cyprus, United Kingdom, Australia, United States and United Arab Emirates. eToro to provide their Forex/CFD trading services to global clients.

This broker has also been regulated by CySEC 109/10, FCA FRN 583263, ASIC 491139, FINRA 298361/SEC#: 8-70212, Financial Services Regulatory Authority (Abu Dhabi) 21092022 and FSA (Seychelles) #SD076.

Since the European arm is licensed by CySEC, it results in traders’ protection by the Investor Compensation Fund (CIF) with maximum coverage of €20,000. As members of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), traders also get the benefit of a protective scheme of up to £85,000.
The USA arm is regulated by FinCEN, so client accounts are segregated from company funds, as stipulated by regulatory requirements.

eToro Summary

Account Information

Apart from the forex demo account, this broker offers Real. To successfully navigate your trading account, you also need to consider about leverage and minimum deposit. Talking about leverage in general, the maximum leverage offered by eToro is up to 1: 400 Meanwhile, you can open an account with a starting capital of $200.

eToro manages to offer a thousand assets across only one account type:

• Real: eToro traders have to deposit a minimum of $200. The Real account offers a relatively high minimum trading volume from 0.1 lots and fixed spread. eToro also provides expert advisors, one-click trading, and mobile trading for its clients. The online brokerage caters to all trading styles, including scalping.

Fees

The broker offers spreads with no commissions charged on over its 2,000 assets but provides spreads from 0.9 pips for EUR/USD and 1.0 pips on the AUD/USD pair. These fees are considered high, but considering that eToro offers social trading services not offered by other brokers, the cost at least understandable.

On CFD trading, spreads are fixed at 0.09% of the price, but financing costs make this asset class less than ideal for trading at eToro. As a market, the broker charges swap rates for positions held overnight.

Details of swap fees can be found on the broker’s website, but the calculation is not. Currently, most brokers base it on the LIBOR (London Inter-bank Offered Rate) plus an internal mark-up. Traders must be aware of overnight fees if positions are maintained for extended periods, as the costs directly impact profits.

At present, the overnight fees are scheduled as follows:

• Cryptocurrencies overnight fees credited/debited on Saturdays and Sundays.
• Currencies and most commodities accumulate triply each Wednesday.
• Saudi Arabian equities face the weekend rollover on Thursdays.
• Other stocks, indices, ETFs, Oil and Natural Gas on Fridays.

Take note that eToro applies the overnight fees at 17:00 New York time on all open positions. Traders will see the applicable costs before confirming an order, displayed at the bottom of each order ticket as the daily and weekend rollover charges.

Instruments Traded

Besides lots of currency pairs, eToro also offers some instruments you would like to trade on, such as Forex, Gold & silver, CFD, Stocks, Indexes, Soft commodities, Metals, ETF, Crypto and Oil for your best choice. Somehow, remember that different instrument has different trading conditions. In this case, you have to make sure that your strategy is well suited for the instrument you chose.

eToro offers a generous range of assets to trade. Not only can you trade with forex pairs, but there are also CFDs and cryptocurrencies:

• 93 cryptocurrency pairs
• 49 currency pairs
• 31 Commodities and Metals
• 13 Index CFDs
• 2000+ Equity CFDs
• 258 ETFs

Payment Methods

Several deposits and withdrawal methods are available including wire transfers, credit/debit cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, Webmoney, Yandex, Rapid Transfer, Klarna/Sofort Banking, and China UnionPay.

Not all methods are available to all traders as the options seem to vary depending on where the trader lives. Deposits processing times take up from instant to seven business days, and fees vary. Fees apply to deposits even though the maximum deposits dependent on the payment processor. Unverified accounts may deposit up to $2,250.

For traders, there are withdrawal fees of $5 each. eToro only allows withdrawal if the name of the payment processor matches the name of the eToro account holder.

Below are the payment methods available at eToro:

 WebMoney : WebMoney is one of the major online wallet services which many people use to send money around the world. For this reason, there is a large number of forex brokers that accept WebMoney today. Like other online payment services today, WebMoney is supported by mobile applications to make transactions more efficient.

 Wire transfer : Wire Transfer is the most commonly used payment method. Nearly all brokers in the world provide this method on their service. The reason is wire transfer is basically traditional transfer between banks in the worldwide. So, this method is guaranteed for its safety. This really helps traders who avoid third-party payments or don’t have credit cards.

 Skrill : Mostly, all forex brokers provide Skrill as an online payment service option. Fast, easy, and safe transactions are the main reasons why traders using this method. Traders can use Skrill to fund their trading accounts with either payment cards, bank wire transfers, or directly from a Skrill e-wallet account.

 PayPal : Online payment was not a thing back in the early 2000s, but PayPal has been in the market since 1999 and thus deserves to be regarded as one of the first e-payment services in the world. The US-based company is popular across many online platforms, including forex brokers.

 Neteller : Like PayPal, Neteller is one of the most popular online payment services today. Due to this popularity, nearly all forex brokers accept Neteller as a payment method for their clients’ fund deposit and withdrawal. Although the Neteller system is available almost all over the world, it remains particularly popular in Europe.

Trading Platforms

Trading platform is a tool where you can buy or trade an instrument with only some clicks on your device, anytime and anywhere you want. In addition, a price chart is also usually provided with some analytical tools to help you analyze the price movement, so you can increase your profitability by placing well-planned trades.

Hereby, eToro offers you eToro Platform, eToro Mobile Trader, Social trading and Web.

eToro operates a webtrader platform that fully supports eToro’s social trading: CopyTrader and Smart Portfolios. The broker’s proprietary platform offers a cleaner interface as compared to MT4. The offering includes:

• TipRanks: granting traders insights from over 15,000 analysts covering equities.
• ProCharts: enables manual traders to conduct technical analysis.

A serious downside of the eToro platform is a lack of support for auto trading systems. While other forex brokers use MetaTrader 4, eToro has shunned MT4 and provides its own platform. eToro’s platform is so comfortable to the point that new traders may not notice the MT4 omission.

Unique Features

As mentioned above, eToro’s trading platform is one of its unique features since it is highly functional and comes with essential features such as:

• CopyTrader: allows users to copy other people’s strategies. Every trader is in full control and can get out of position at their own discretion. eToro’s copy trading is an advantage of this broker, where the community represents one of the largest among all online brokers.
• Smart Portfolios: this allows traders to copy a portfolio of mutual funds or other asset bundles. eToro claims that the copied portfolios are professionally managed by its investment committee.
• Popular Investor Program: offers additional income to traders with a strong following base as well as owning ownership of many trading assets. In essence, Popular Investors can make money by generating volume from their followers, as well as enjoying the benefits of their own trading activities.

Research and Education

The educational content at eToro is rather limited since most traders are there to copy others, not to learn about the markets on their own. However, the firm has an appealing proposition because of the number of useful additional features on offer:

• Daily Market Review: featuring a quick overview of assets with a sentiment analysis based on eToro portfolios.
• The Complete Guide to FinTech: provides basic educational content for new retail traders. eToro also manages a blog, covering topics related to trading and company-related topics.
• Regular traders can find equity ratings via a partnership with TipRanks.

Bonuses and Promotions

The eToro Club grants several promo deals for each level of membership based on the equity value of the portfolio.

• The Silver tier is granted for deposits from $5,000
• Gold from $10,000
• Platinum from $25,000
• Platinum Plus from $50,000
• Diamond from $250,000

There’s also a refer-a-friend program with no monetary compensation provided. Refer A Friend program is available in certain regions.

Customer Support

Do you have any question or find any trouble related to eToro? If you do, you should reach eToro’s support to get the information that you need. Here is the detail of the broker’s customer support:

For those looking for a reliable customer support team, eToro is probably the best option. At eToro, customer support can be reached via Help Center 24 hours between Monday to Friday. Help Center includes an FAQ section and an option to submit a help ticket. This broker also has reliable support via OpenBook, where the response time is noted as a few hours.