The broker guide.

What a broker is — and how it makes money

Keep the picture from the course: the fund is the thing you own; the broker is the counter you buy it over.

A broker is a regulated firm that takes your order, executes it on an exchange, and then holds the fund units in custody under your name. That last part matters more than the app design: the units are yours, not the broker's. They sit segregated from the firm's own money — which is why a broker going bust is a very different event from a bank of the 1930s going bust, and we'll walk through exactly that below.

So if the job is that simple, how can so many apps afford to do it for "free"?

Nobody runs a regulated financial firm as a hobby. A broker earns from some mix of: a fee per order; a custody or platform fee for holding your stuff; the currency conversion, whenever your money and your fund speak different currencies; the spread, when it routes your order to a single trading venue instead of letting exchanges compete; the interest earned on the cash sitting idle in your account; lending out shares to short-sellers; and — at several of the apps — the products next door: leveraged bets where most customers lose, which subsidise the boring index-fund counter you came for.

"Free" only ever means the bill moved somewhere on that list. For a monthly ETF buyer, a free broker can still genuinely be the cheapest deal on the table — the point is knowing which line of the list you're paying through.

One more piece of context, because it's fresh: for years, some "free" brokers were paid by the trading venues for routing orders to them — payment for order flow. The EU banned it, fully, from mid-2026 — and the fee schedules are repricing as I write this. Which means every "cheapest broker" list written before the ban is now partly out of date, this page's figures carry their verification date on them, and if the date up top looks old, distrust it.

→ What fees do to decades — The Fee Drag

The six things that decide it

For someone buying one broad UCITS fund every month — the pattern this whole site is built around — the choice comes down to six things. In roughly this order.

1. The total cost of your pattern. Not the headline commission — the total: what one purchase costs by the route you'd actually use, plus the fixed yearly fees, plus any percentage of your pot, plus conversion if your fund trades in another currency. A €0 commission with a conversion fee on every buy can cost more than a €2 order fee in euros. This is arithmetic, so I built you a calculator that does it per broker.

→ The Broker Bill — your yearly cost, computed

2. Whether the buying can run without you. A savings plan — the broker's word for "buy this fund automatically every month" — plus fractional units, so your whole €200 goes in rather than whatever round number of shares it can afford. The course said the real trick is making it automatic; a broker where automation is native beats a slightly cheaper one where every month needs your willpower. Boring, self-executing, done.

3. What protects you. Three different layers, almost always confused: segregation of your fund units (the main protection), the national investor-compensation scheme behind the broker (the backstop, usually €20,000-ish), and what happens to your idle cash (different rules entirely). The layers section below takes this apart properly.

4. Currency handling. Most beginners in the eurozone can buy a euro-listed line of a global fund and never pay conversion at all. If you live in a non-euro country, or insist on a dollar-listed fund, the conversion fee hits every single monthly buy — small print, recurring forever. Check the fund's listings before you check the broker's logo.

→ Same fund, several listings — The Tracking Gap explains

5. Tax paperwork in your country. The quiet giant. In some countries, a domestic-style broker withholds your tax and files the numbers; a foreign one hands you a CSV and wishes you luck — sometimes with a foreign-assets declaration on top, just for holding your funds abroad. An hour with the wrong tax form every year is a real cost that never appears on a fee table. Some brokers do this properly in five countries and not at all in the next one; it's a column in the comparison below.

6. The exit door. The fee nobody checks on the way in: what it costs to transfer your funds OUT, whole, to another broker — and whether the broker supports in-kind transfers at all. You'll probably hold these funds for decades; the odds you'll want to move them once are decent. A locked exit turns "I'll just switch later" into a taxable sale.

And the things that don't decide it, whatever the ads say: how many thousands of ETFs a platform lists (you need one); the interest rate on idle cash (it moves with the central bank — bait, not a reason); sign-up bonuses (a bribe amortised over a thirty-year relationship is zero); and how pretty the app is (you'll open it once a month, ideally less).

The comparison

The table below runs every broker's own price sheet through the same pattern — a monthly buy of one global UCITS fund, by each broker's cheapest sensible route — alongside the protection and the tax help. Figures are from the brokers' own documents, verified on the date up top; the profiles under it say the things a table can't.

The nine, honestly

What the table can't say. Three things per broker: who you're actually dealing with, the honest catch, and who it genuinely fits. (Your bank is the tenth entry — it gets the next section to itself.)

DEGIRO

The old default of European index investors — today a branch of a German bank, serving most of the EU from a single entity. Its appeal is a cheap flat handling fee on a core list of ETFs; its limits are structural: no savings plans and no fractional shares, so every month means logging in and buying whole units by hand, and the cheap list runs through a single trading venue. It pays nothing on your idle cash — that's part of how the cheap trades get paid for. Fits someone who doesn't mind ten manual clicks a month and wants broad, cheap market access from almost anywhere in the EU.

Interactive Brokers

The forums' default answer to "which is safest?", and the plumbing some of the other apps quietly build on — an Irish-regulated arm of a listed US giant that acts as custodian for a few of its own competitors. Multi-currency accounts, every exchange that matters, and a recurring-investments programme that buys a wide set of UCITS ETFs without commission — funded, as IBKR itself discloses, by a small payment from the fund makers. That's the honest kind of free: printed where you can read it. The catch is fit, not fees — it's an institution-grade cockpit, and the cash interest is engineered to reward big balances. For the six-figure pot, the multi-currency life, and anyone who wants the door that's never the wrong door.

Trade Republic

A German bank inside an app, and the smoothest version of this site's pattern where it operates: savings plans execute free, fractions from a euro, and idle cash earns the central bank's rate. In its biggest markets it also does the tax paperwork natively — the rare app where April doesn't arrive with homework. The caveats: euro-only, app-first, and its whole execution model was rebuilt days after the PFOF ban — manual orders now carry a small settlement fee, and the repricing may not be finished. Available in seventeen-ish countries; the list moves.

Scalable Capital

Munich's answer, and since late 2025 a full bank with an ECB licence. Savings plans are free from one euro, fractions ride along inside them, and there's no CFD wing anywhere on the platform — rare on this list. The catches are reach and structure: it serves only six countries, it withholds tax for Germans only, and the free tier's economics lean on a subscription upsell and a trading venue it co-owns. One more thing that belongs in the open: the most-cited ETF comparison site in Europe is its subsidiary — worth remembering wherever you see its name recommended.

Trading 212

The widest-available of the free apps — nearly all of the EEA — and the fullest automation: zero commission, a small conversion fee as its main visible charge, and "Pies" that auto-invest and rebalance with fractions. The fine print is where your attention should go. Which entity you contract with depends on your country, and with it the compensation scheme behind you; share lending can be on unless you turn it off (and isn't offered at all under its German entity); interest on cash comes via money-market funds, which are investments, not insured deposits. And the leveraged side of the house lives one tab away. Free, genuinely — checked settings and a closed tab are the price.

XTB

A Warsaw-listed broker with real local branches across a stretch of Europe, zero commission on ETF buys up to a generous monthly volume, and savings plans with fractions. Two things to hold next to that: around ninety-five percent of its revenue comes from CFD traders — the leveraged side is the business, and your ETF account is the shop window — and its home regulator fined it heavily this spring over how CFD risks were presented to clients. One more surprise: even at its German branch, the tax paperwork stays yours. Cheap and capable — just know whose shop you're standing in, and skip the aisle you didn't come for.

eToro

The most advertised name on the list, and the likeliest to be in your feed. For the record: ETF buys are commission-free, recurring investments exist, and a euro-account path now avoids currency conversion on euro-listed funds — the plumbing genuinely improved. But it's a trading platform first: the UCITS shelf only arrived in 2026, the account's native tongue is the dollar, and crypto and leveraged products share the room — a short or leveraged position there is a CFD even when it's dressed as a stock. It can hold a monthly index plan. It's a lot of machine for a job this small.

Revolut

The app half of Europe already carries, which is exactly its pitch: the investing lives where your card does. Two facts to keep separate: your cash sits at its bank, with a real deposit guarantee; your investments sit at its Lithuanian brokerage, under that country's separate, smaller investor scheme. The ETF shelf is a fraction of a full broker's, free trades are rationed by subscription tier, and the recurring "Investment Plans" are the genuinely commission-free route. As a first, small, automatic drip it works. If your plan outgrows the shelf, the switching section below is how you leave without a tax bill.

Saxo

The premium end: a Danish bank, designated systemically important, with access to practically every market — and, since a 2024 overhaul, fees that compete instead of apologising. The structural difference is the custody fee: a yearly percentage of everything you hold (plus VAT for EU residents), the one cost the free apps don't charge — and per-order minimums that make tiny monthly buys proportionally expensive, with no auto-invest or fractions for most EU clients. Wrong shape for a €200 drip; a reasonable shape for a large, settled portfolio that values a bank-grade counterparty and doesn't buy in sips.

Your bank sells funds too

Before you open anything new: you already have a broker. Your bank almost certainly sells funds — at prices nobody compares, because banks don't pay affiliate commissions and so never appear on "best broker" lists. Sometimes those prices are absurd. Sometimes they're fine. The refreshing part is that you can find out in five minutes.

Somewhere on your bank's site is a price sheet — search its name plus "fees", "tariff" or "brochure" — and on it, two numbers: what one fund purchase costs (often a percentage with a minimum) and the yearly custody fee (often a percentage of everything you hold). Type those two numbers into the calculator and your bank appears in the ranking, next to the apps.

→ Add your bank's row — The Broker Bill

Two honest things about banks. The percentage custody fee is the one to fear: per-order fees stop when you stop buying, but a custody percentage compounds against your whole pot forever — it's a second TER you're paying for storage. But a bank account you already trust, in your own tax system, with your own language on the phone, is worth something real — and in a few countries the bank route is also the tax-simple route. If your bank's two numbers are genuinely small, staying put is a perfectly good answer. No affiliate page will ever tell you that; it pays them nothing. It pays me nothing too — the difference is I don't mind.

If your broker dies

The question under every other question — so let's actually walk through the Tuesday your broker announces it's insolvent.

Your fund units don't vanish, because they were never the broker's. Client securities sit segregated — held for you, typically at a separate depositary, off the firm's own balance sheet. The administrator's job is to hand them back or move them to another firm. Creditors can't eat your ETFs. In the normal course of a broker failure, you get your investments back whole; the wait is measured in weeks or months, not the pot.

The famous €20,000 is not a cap on what's safe to invest. That number is the investor-compensation scheme — the national backstop that pays out if, after a failure, client assets turn out to be missing: fraud, sloppy segregation, a hole where your units should be. It's the insurance against the broker having lied, not against the broker having failed. Most EU schemes cover in the neighbourhood of €20,000 per client; the table shows each broker's scheme and ceiling, because it depends on the country whose licence the broker operates under — not on the country you live in.

Cash is the different animal. Uninvested cash doesn't get the segregation story. Depending on the broker, it sits at partner banks (where the €100,000-per-bank deposit guarantee applies), in money-market funds (where it's an investment, with fund rules), or with the broker's own banking licence (its own deposit scheme). Each broker's row says where the cash sleeps. The practical habit is simpler: a broker is a place to hold investments, not savings — keep your buffer where you bank, and don't let five figures of cash sit idle at an investment app.

So the honest hierarchy, worth more than any safety score: segregation quality and a licence from a serious regulator first; the compensation scheme as backstop; cash rules last — because you won't be parking cash there anyway. And a plain fact rather than advice: the schemes are per firm, per client — which is why plenty of people, once the pot gets seriously past the ceilings, simply hold it across two brokers and sleep well.

→ Investor compensation scheme, in the glossary

Your country changes the answer

Everything above is European. This section is why "best broker in Europe" is still the wrong question.

Availability first. Not every broker operates everywhere — a few of the biggest names in the comparison are absent from whole stretches of the map, which makes half the listicles you'll read useless to you before their first affiliate link. And how a broker is present matters too: one serving your country cross-border from abroad leaves you under its home country's compensation scheme and paperwork; one with a local branch or licence may slot into your national system. Same app, different fine print by country.

Tax paperwork second — often it should be first. In a few countries the difference between a tax-integrated broker and a foreign app is the difference between doing nothing in April and doing spreadsheets. Some brokers withhold your tax at source and file for you in their home markets; the same brokers, one border over, hand you an annual statement and leave the declaring to you — occasionally including a separate "you hold assets abroad" form with its own thresholds and its own fines. The comparison's tax column shows where each broker documents native tax handling; for what your country demands of you, the atlas has your page.

And your wrapper beats all of it. If your country runs a tax-advantaged account — the kinds the European guide walks through — the tax saved inside the right wrapper is usually worth more than any fee difference between brokers. Which brokers offer your country's wrapper is a shorter list than any comparison table; start there, then compare within it.

→ The European FIRE guide — the wrapper section

Opening the account

The step itself, demystified — the whole thing is an evening, most of it waiting for a verification email.

1. Have your ID and your tax number ready. Every legitimate broker must ask — it's anti-money-laundering law, not nosiness. A "broker" that doesn't ask is the scam the course warned you about.
2. Answer the suitability quiz honestly. EU rules make brokers ask what you know and how you'd cope with losses. Answering honestly may put warnings between you and some products. Good — most of those products deserve their warnings, and none of them are the one global fund you came for.
3. Move a first small amount in. Not the pot — a test transfer. See it arrive, see the fee (there usually isn't one for a plain bank transfer), learn the app with money that doesn't scare you.
4. Find your fund by its ISIN, not its name. The same fund lists on several exchanges in several currencies; the ISIN is the one string that can't buy you the wrong thing. Prefer the line in your own currency, for the reasons above.
5. Buy once by hand. Feel the order ticket: amount, venue, the fee line. This is the moment "investing" stops being abstract — it's ten calm clicks.
6. Then set the savings plan and log out. Automatic amount, automatic date, reinvest as you go. The correct number of times to open a broker app per month is roughly one, and falling.

→ Which fund? The real ones, compared — The Tracking Gap

Leaving later

You're not marrying anyone. But check the divorce terms before the wedding, because they're the one fee the "open account" button never mentions.

The clean way out of a broker is an in-kind transfer: your fund units move to the new broker as units — nothing is sold, nothing is taxed, the decades of compounding roll on undisturbed. Whether that's cheap, expensive or effectively impossible depends on the broker: some charge per position, some do it free, and some route your purchases in ways that make transferring out harder than it should be. The comparison notes each one's exit terms.

The expensive way out is selling everything and re-buying at the new place. Sell-and-rebuy is a taxable event, and in most countries it means settling up on all your accumulated gains years before you needed to. The tax bill for switching carelessly is routinely bigger than a decade of the fee difference you were switching for. I hold the same boring funds I started with, partly for exactly this reason — never confuse optimising with churning.

So: pick well once, using the boring criteria above. Revisit rarely — when your broker actually reprices, not when an ad shows you a shinier app. And if you do move, move the units, not the money.

The plumbing rule

Here's the whole page in one paragraph. The broker is plumbing. It matters the way plumbing matters: it should be sound, cheap to run, safe when something bursts — and then it should disappear from your life. The people selling you broker-as-lifestyle need you opening the app daily; your plan needs the opposite. Pick one that fits your country, your pattern and the six things above, set the monthly buy, and close the app.

The fund does the work. The broker just holds the door — and the less you notice it from here on, the better it's doing its job. What will you do with the evening you just got back?

No affiliate links on this page — no broker pays me, none of them knows it's here, and the comparisons run on their own published price sheets. Education, not advice: fee schedules move, countries differ, and the right choice depends on a situation I can't see. The verified date up top is the page's honesty — if it looks old, check the price sheet before you act.