Hey guys, it's sasha today, i'm going to be reviewing one of the most popular investing apps in the world etoro. I have used itaro for a few months now, and i've done a lot of testing in that time, which i will be talking about in this video. Also importantly, this video is not paid for or sponsored by etoro. You may have seen investing ad reviews out there, including on youtube that are extremely, maybe somewhat overly positive and mention none of the downsides.

Well, this review will not be one of those i'll be telling you exactly the good things that i like about etoro and the bad things that i don't like. Just like. I do with every platform i personally use atari because it offers some unique features that i will come to in just a bit, but so far i have mostly been testing out the platform out for this review, so i really look forward to actually using it properly Going forward now for full disclosure, i do have an affiliate link in the description if you choose to go and use the platform after watching this review, but that's about it. Another disclaimer i have to make is, i am not a financial advisor.

I cannot provide financial advice to you and, if you do need financial advice about making investments or choosing a platform make sure you go and seek the help of a suitably qualified professional now, first, let's go and talk about the key platform features and pricing. Etoro is unique in that you can sign up for the app whether you live in the us uk, europe, australia or pretty much anywhere in the world. They do have a list of countries on their website where you won't be able to sign up, including antarctica. So if you're, a penguin you'll have to wait for another app to come along.

Unfortunately, etoro is authorized and regulated by a lot of different countries, including over the united states and by the fca in the uk, where i live, go and check if they're regulated properly in the country you live in as well. The likelihood is, they probably are. The etoro platform is unique in that it combines regular investing cfds and crypto into the same platform rather than keeping them distinct. Like most other platforms choose to do that has its pros and cons, and i'm gon na talk about that.

In a minute, but first, let's talk about these fees. The really good thing about etoro is that there are no transaction fees at all on regular investing. There is no commission, no management fee, no custody fees, no foreign exchange fees on transactions. There is the one fee that you do have to pay whatever.

It is that you choose to invest in with the torah and that's the foreign exchange for you when you load money into the platform and when you then withdraw the money out. Making withdrawal withdrawals also costs an extra five dollars on top of that fee, so you probably don't want to be making too many of them too often now the phone exchange fee that applies when you do those deposits and withdrawals is not 0.5 for countries like the Uk eu and some others, but in some countries that fee may be higher and in some cases like, for example, with australia. That fee is higher when you make a deposit than when you make withdrawal so go and check to make sure that you are happy with those fees where you live now you could make a deposit by converting the money into dollars somewhere else. First, before you go and deposit it into your torah to try to avoid that fee in uk, for example, you could use revolut or transfer wise, which is a common way that people think they can get around it, but to satisfy money laundering.

Regulations, etoro seems to only allow to you to withdraw money to the same method that you have used to deposit in the first place. There's not even a way that i can see in your account to actually change the method for withdrawing money, and there are a lot of reports of people who have tried to use methods like revolut, for example, of not being able to actually then get their money Back out afterwards or having a lot of trouble with it and they're taking quite a long time, so just make sure that you're aware of those limitations, i personally have just used a card and paid the fee to avoid that problem. The other thing to remember is that etoro has higher minimum deposits than some other platforms. If you live in the us, the minimum is just 50, but for most other countries like the uk, where i live it's 200, although there are some exceptions where the fee is larger.

The great thing, as i mentioned, is that once the money is in, there are no transaction fees for regular investing, which is great. This means that, for anyone who invests the same money regularly over time into different companies, etoro will actually be cheaper than the likes of trading 212 and free trade, where you have to pay the foreign exchange fee for every trade. Every time you go and buy and sell a stock and the only other fee for regular investors is a ten dollars per month in activity fee which you get charged. If you stop logging into your account for over a year, so don't go and do that now.

If you are into trading cfds and stocks, there's a whole load of other fees that you need to be aware of as well. They both have spreads that are charged that are not charged on regular stocks and stock and etf cfd spreads are relatively low. They cost 0.9 percent crypto commodities. Currencies and indices have various different levels so go and check.

If that's the kind of thing that you're interested in trading, i personally don't go there and don't invest in those things. So so you need to go and do your own homework on that. On top of that, if you're trading cfds, there will be overnight fees for keeping your positions open and again, there's a whole range of different types of fees associated with that so go and look into that. If you are interested in that, if you are new to investing or if you've invested for some time but are interested in investing in cfds, remember that they are a complex instrument and for most people they may not be a good idea or the right thing to Use there is a reason why tory have to display a disclaimer, at least in the uk, at the top saying.

Cfds are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage 67 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. Now, let's talk about the app itself, this one is interesting as it's a mixed bag with some really good things and some things that i think could be improved. On the one hand, everything looks pretty good and sharp there's bright, colors and a nice layout, and those are a really big plus.

But the thing i don't like about it is the fact it is very much trying and wanting to be a trading platform and not an investing platform, which is the kind of thing that i'm interested in the moment. You log in you're, greeted by everything, flashing and changing lots of red and green and things jumping up and down. This is very different to some of the other platforms as a long-term investor that doesn't really appeal to me. So much as i feel like it's trying.

A bit too hard to try to be that active trader. Look that thing continues when you're going to look in your investments. So if, for example, you've got multiple different times at which you invest in the company, you'll see these different individual trades listed and if you want to go and sell back out of those, you have to go and click individually to close those positions. That is very much a sort of active trader mindset rather than a long-term investor.

One, which brings me neatly to my next point, which is etoro, also don't offer isis in the uk or other types of tax advantages accounts in other countries. Now i understand why that is they operate in so many different jurisdictions that it is incredibly difficult to create specific accounts, specific reporting and meet those reporting requirements in all those different countries. So i do get that, but when you compare them to other platforms that are available, for example in the uk, that is a big disadvantage because the other platforms, many of them, do offer these tax advantages accounts. But anyway, let me mention two really cool unique features that etoro does have that no other platform offers.

The first is weird and it's the fact that etoro actually absorbs uk stamp duty on the purchase of uk shares. Normally, when you go and buy a big uk uk company that trades on the london stock exchange, you have to pay a 0.5 percent tax. Now i don't know why, maybe because of their tech setup or their regulatory reporting, but etoro actually covered that tax. For you, i went and checked the price of a number of big different uk companies on atari and compared them to the prices of those same companies and other platforms, and i did not see any discrepancy at all and certainly any changes of differences in price.

We're extremely small, far below that level of tax, so that tax is not hidden in the spread or anything like that from everything that i can tell, which is what some other people have suggested could be the case before the other. Really unique thing is that you can't invest in popular european and global etfs, like vusa, for example, because the taurus platform operates in the us as well. What that does mean is that you can invest in us etfs like vu, which is the us equivalent of vusa, which you can't do in any other platform. The way it works is, you will invest in those etfs via a cfd instead of buying the actual shares, and you can invest in their cfd without using any leverage which takes out that natural level of risk the cfds normally pose and without having to incur any Extra fees now i understand that you will have to pay the 0.09 cfd spread on buying and selling these, but it does mean that you can go and invest in things like kathy woods arc in innovation.

Etf. If you live in the uk or europe which you can't do on any other platform in this way with the atari, the minimum amount you can invest per trade is higher than some of the other apps. You have to put a minimum of 50 dollars in, but you can buy fractional shares, which is a benefit, so you can still make relatively low investments in companies who have very high share prices. If you live in a country like the uk, that has a tax treaty with the united states, you need to know something quite important about dividends.

The us has something called a dividend: withholding tax, thirty percent of any dividends paid to you by a us company that you are invested in will be subject to that tax. Now, with most platforms, when you sign up the platform, will complete and submit on your behalf, the w8 ben form, and that lets you in some countries that have this tax treaty with the us to pay a lower level of withholding tax in the uk, for example, It's only 15 instead of the 30.. Now, when you first start investing in u.s companies on etoro, you are asked to confirm your w8bn details and i did that when i created my account, but i read and read it in some other forums that this might not actually work as intended. So i did a test.

I went and bought one share of caterpillar on the 19th of april, a few days before the date on which i had to own the share to qualify for a dividend and on may the 20th. Just a few days ago i received my one dollar and three cent payment, except, as you can see down here, i only got 72 cents paid to me and that's because i had the 30 tax taken off as a dividend withholding tax instead of the 15 that I would qualify for now. I asked the question and toro are apparently working to fix this, but i've seen people complaining about this for years. So i'm not sure when this will change and if you get a lot of this overcharging of withholding tax, you can technically claim it from the us government, but i am not sure that most people will want to go through that process.

However, i also don't actually invest for dividends and many of the great companies they invest in, don't even pay dividends and those that do pay tend to pay incredibly low amounts. So it's something that i personally am actually not particularly bothered by, although for some people this might be an important consideration. Italy does have one major difference to other investing apps through their social aspect. If you go and look up a company using their search, for example, you can go and look at people discussing it and people putting forward their views as to whether the company is overvalued or undervalued, and some interesting speculation and news discussion and the big focal point Of this whole social element is etoro's copy trading feature.

What it does is it allows you to go and find somebody else on the platform and literally copy their trading strategy going forward. Whatever they buy, you will buy whatever they sell. You will sell whenever they do it now. This is an interesting one.

It is a super interesting feature on the one hand, because it allows people who are inexperienced or simply don't have the time or feel like somebody is in a better position than them to make decisions to go and copy any seasoned investor if they so choose. But it is also really quite dangerous. You're essentially forfeiting control of your investment strategy to some random guy on the internet. That you probably don't know - and you probably don't know much about their goals or the reasons for why they're doing their trading or whether those reasons actually even align with yours.

And if the person is actually any good in the long term, i've been doing a bit of testing over the last few months and i am invested in tech for the long term. So if you copied my portfolio because of the testing i've been doing where i have lost some money for doing it and because of my tech investments, you would be 33 down. So don't do that. Don't go and copy me and think very carefully about copying.

Other people now i'm looking forward to not intentionally doing stupid things in the interest of science. Now that i've done this review and now that i've got the data, but talking about the data, the data side of etoro has definitely improved. Recently, you can go and look at information about the company by clicking on the stats and the chart tabs. You can see high-level data in basic financial summary, but the data is somewhat minimal and i wish there would be a bit more detail on here like, for example, with trading 212, who provide a more comprehensive set of financial performance reports.

The price chart has definitely improved too, but it still feels a bit raw and a bit less refined, not as neat as some of the other investing apps. Having said that, some apps, like free trade, don't really offer the data or the information at all. So this is still really pretty good in comparison now, because atari has some unique advantages and some of those unique features that i mentioned. I am going to continue using the platform more going forward alongside other apps that i also use.

I really like the fact that you can invest in some of the etfs that i can't invest anywhere else, and i like the fact that, if i want to go and invest in crypto, if i can do it here without having to manage a separate crypto account And without having to go and load and withdraw money separately from it - and this is a fully regulated platform, unlike some of those others, if you're interested in trying it out, feel free to go and use my link in the description below. Unfortunately, there are no free shares available, but plenty of good reasons to give it a go. I hope you found this useful if you have please make sure you go and hit the like button for youtube algorithms, so that this video can reach more people. Thank you.

So much for watching, i really really appreciate it and, as always i'll see you guys later.