Smartbroker+

Smartbroker+ runs a two-speed price list and understanding which speed you are on is the whole game.

Speed one is gettex, the electronic venue of the Munich exchange and Smartbroker's premium partner. Shares, bonds, ETFs, ETPs and funds cost EUR 0.00 per order from EUR 500 of order value, and EUR 1.00 below it. Derivatives on gettex cost EUR 0.00 with UniCredit and EUR 2.00 with Goldman Sachs above EUR 500, EUR 4.00 otherwise. OTC direct trading is free above EUR 500 with J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS, UniCredit and Vontobel, EUR 2.00 with DZ BANK, EUR 4.00 with BNP and Societe Generale.

Speed two is everything else, and it is a conventional discount-broker tariff:

Savings plans are free on shares, ETFs, ETCs, funds and crypto ETPs, from EUR 1.00 to EUR 5,000 per instalment. The price list is candid that the standard rate would otherwise be 0.2% with a EUR 1.00 minimum - the free status is a promotion, not a contractual floor.

Crypto is the weak spot: 0.90% of market value plus the venue's own mark-up, with a EUR 1.00 surcharge below EUR 500.

Structurally, custody, sub-accounts, currency accounts, deposits and withdrawals are all free and there is no inactivity fee. Money left idle earns 2.25% p.a. up to EUR 100,000 on the Zinskonto, which for a EUR 20,000 cash buffer is worth EUR 450 a year and quietly outweighs most of the commission differences discussed above.

Smartbroker+ is assembled from two regulated entities and it is worth knowing which does what.

Smartbroker AG (Ritterstrasse 11, 10969 Berlin, HRB 99126 B, board Thomas Soltau and Rene Krueger) holds an authorisation under section 15 WpIG and is supervised jointly by BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank. It is the investment firm you contract with, and its compensation body is the Entschaedigungseinrichtung der Wertpapierhandelsunternehmen (EdW), which pays 90% of an eligible claim up to EUR 20,000. It also holds a section 34c GewO permission for credit brokerage.

Baader Bank AG (Weihenstephaner Strasse 4, 85716 Unterschleissheim, HRB 121537) holds the full banking licence, runs the clearing account and the Zinskonto, and keeps the securities in custody. That is where the money actually is, so:

• Cash is covered by the statutory German deposit guarantee up to EUR 100,000 per client.
• Baader is additionally a member of the private banks' voluntary Einlagensicherungsfonds. Published third-party estimates of that additional ceiling currently disagree with one another, so we record only the statutory figure and note the extra layer exists.
• Securities are client property. They are not on Baader's balance sheet and would be handed back in an insolvency. Only a failure to deliver would trigger investor compensation, at 90% up to EUR 20,000.
• One practical catch: the EUR 100,000 is per client per bank. If you also hold a finanzen.net ZERO or Traders Place account, they run on Baader too and share the same limit.

The parent, Smartbroker Holding AG (formerly wallstreet:online AG, ISIN DE000A2GS609, 16,781,252 shares), is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange - but in the Basic Board, an open-market segment without the disclosure obligations of the regulated market. Treat the listing as a modest transparency plus, not as the same signal a Prime Standard or Nasdaq listing would give.

The blemish on the record is operational rather than regulatory: the October 2023 migration from DAB to Baader Bank went badly, with weeks of malfunctions and an unreachable support line. No regulator acted, and the problems are resolved, but it cost Smartbroker its Finanztip recommendation until October 2024.

The app is the front door and it is not optional: onboarding runs through it, and it requires iOS 16 or Android 10 or newer. German App Store ratings sit at roughly 4.3 out of 5 across about 2,200 ratings as of August 2026 - the middle of the German neobroker field. The web platform mirrors it with the full order ticket across all 29 venues, watchlists, price alerts and document access.

The genuinely unusual piece is the REST trading API at EUR 29.90 a month. Almost no German retail broker at this price point offers programmatic access at all, and Smartbroker gives it away free from the first VIP tier upward.

The VIP ladder is graded on trades per quarter, excluding savings-plan executions, and upgrades happen automatically at quarter end:

• 45 trades a quarter - VIP Active: named contact, five sub-accounts instead of two, free API
• 1,500 trades - VIP Silver: Tradegate and L&S drop to EUR 2.00, Xetra to EUR 3.00, Baader Trading to EUR 0.00
• 6,000 trades - VIP Gold: Tradegate and L&S drop to EUR 1.00, Xetra to EUR 2.00

Forty-five trades a quarter is fifteen a month. That is an unusually low bar for a named contact and free API access, and it is the strongest argument for an active German investor to be here rather than at a single-venue app.

The one legacy trap: accounts opened before September 2023 that were never migrated still sit on the DAB/BNP Paribas platform, where a German exchange order costs about EUR 9 and savings-plan executions cost EUR 1 each. If you have an old Smartbroker login you have not touched since 2023, check which platform it is on before you place anything.

This is the section that separates Smartbroker+ from every pure neobroker in the German market.

• Shares: about 40,000, German and international, tradable on gettex, on all seven German exchanges and on eighteen foreign venues including Nasdaq, NYSE, Toronto, TSX Venture, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Vienna, Zurich, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen
• Bonds: about 40,000 government and corporate issues as individual securities, not just ETFs - the single largest functional gap at most neobrokers
• ETFs and ETPs: more than 2,500, plus precious-metal ETCs for gold and silver exposure
• Funds: about 18,000 with a 100% discount on the front-end load, bought at net asset value, with over 500 available as savings plans
• Derivatives: more than 4.6 million warrants, certificates and knock-outs from eight issuer desks trading 08:00 to 22:00
• Crypto: real coins from EUR 0.01 to EUR 100,000 per order, 24/7, held in a wallet inside the same account

What is absent is anything genuinely leveraged and exchange-traded: no options, no futures, no forex and no CFDs. Directional leverage comes only in packaged form through knock-outs and factor certificates, where the maximum loss is what you paid.

The practical benefit of the foreign venue access is under-appreciated. A thinly traded Nordic small cap or a Canadian miner will have a real order book on its home exchange and a wide, occasionally absent quote on a German venue. Paying EUR 4 plus the Stockholm pass-through to trade it at home rather than accepting a two-percent spread in Frankfurt is often the cheaper trade by a wide margin — but read the minimum before you count on it, because Stockholm carries a floor of SEK 315, roughly EUR 29, which is what you actually pay on any order below about EUR 29,000 - which is precisely the calculation a single-venue broker cannot let you make.

One documentation caveat: the website and the July 2026 price list quote different Stockholm surcharges: the conditions page says 0.03%, the Preis- und Leistungsverzeichnis says 0.10%. The price list is the contractual document, it is the one the conditions page itself links to, and it has carried 0.10% since at least August 2024 — so 0.10% is the figure to plan with. Stockholm is the only one of the twelve foreign venues where the two documents disagree; every other percentage matches. Check the ex-ante cost disclosure before a first order all the same.

Opening runs entirely through the app. You enter personal, employment and tax data, then identify yourself by Postident in a branch, by video call, or with the eID function of the German ID card - the widest set of identification routes among the cheap German brokers. Passport-based video identification additionally requires a proof of address. Smartbroker quotes three business days to a usable account. There is no minimum deposit.

Funding is SEPA credit transfer only - no cards, no PayPal, no e-wallets. Deposits and withdrawals to the registered reference account are free. Beyond the euro clearing account, Baader Bank can open foreign-currency accounts so that a US or Swiss position settles and pays dividends in its own currency rather than being converted twice; if no matching currency account exists at order time, Baader converts at its own rate from the international FX market, and a currency surcharge applies (the Konditionen page lists "+ Währungsaufschlag" for international venues). Baader's own price list sets that rate as a bid or ask price derived from the Reuters feed, with a maximum bid/ask spread of 30 pips for EUR/USD, EUR/CHF, EUR/GBP, EUR/CAD, EUR/AUD and EUR/JPY below a volume of 50,000 (20 pips from 50,000 to 500,000, 10 pips above), and of 200 pips for EUR/SEK, EUR/NOK and EUR/DKK in the lowest band (100 and 50 pips in the two higher ones). A currency account moves the conversion rather than avoiding it: according to the FAQ, it can only be topped up by internal booking from the euro clearing account.

Transferring an existing portfolio in is supported and free from a German provider - the point on which justTRADE fails outright. Smartbroker points clients at a dedicated depot-switching service and warns the process can take up to three weeks. You will need your tax identification number, the old account number and the ten-digit Smartbroker account number, the old account must have no open orders, and running savings plans there should be stopped first. As with every German transfer, do not move anything you might want to sell in the meantime.

Two further conveniences worth noting: sub-accounts (Nebendepots) are free - two as standard, five at VIP - which makes it easy to separate a long-term core from a speculative sleeve inside one login, and second accounts are straightforward to open, which several rivals do not allow at all.

For a German investor this is where Smartbroker+ is genuinely strong, because the custodian is a German bank and therefore the statutory withholding agent (auszahlende Stelle).

Everything a domestic investor expects is present and automated:

• Abgeltungsteuer at 25% plus solidarity surcharge and, on request, church tax is withheld at source on realised gains, dividends, interest and distributions and paid directly to the tax office.
• The Freistellungsauftrag can be lodged in the app, including a joint order with a spouse or civil partner, and a cross-partner loss offset (ehegattenuebergreifende Verlustverrechnung) can be applied for - a feature many app-first brokers simply do not implement.
• Baader runs tax optimisation and recalculation during the year, and refunds capital-gains tax already paid once a Freistellungsauftrag is lodged.
• The Vorabpauschale on accumulating funds is calculated and collected automatically each January - the point at which foreign brokers push the work back onto the client.
• Double taxation treaties are applied, US withholding tax is handled, and a tax voucher for Swiss shares can be requested, which matters if you use the SIX venue.
• Verlustbescheinigung, Nichtveranlagungsbescheinigung and the annual tax documents are all supported, including accepting a loss certificate from a previous bank.
• The KiSTAM query for church tax runs automatically, with the option of a blocking notice.

The one tax cost the broker cannot remove is the financial transaction tax levied by France, Italy, Spain and Greece, which is passed straight through on trades in those markets. Smartbroker at least lets you trade them; several German neobrokers respond to the same problem by removing those markets entirely.

The net effect for a German-resident investor: an ordinary year with only a Smartbroker+ account usually needs no entry in the Anlage KAP at all.

Research is adequate rather than a reason to choose the broker. What exists is drawn from the parent group's publishing side - Smartbroker Holding is the company behind wallstreet:online, one of Germany's oldest retail finance communities, and that gives the ecosystem news flow, forums and market commentary that a standalone app cannot match. Inside the Smartbroker+ product itself you get instrument pages, price alerts, watchlists and the SMARTBROKER+ Magazin blog. There is no in-house analyst desk, no target prices and no screener comparable to a full-service broker.

Education runs through the SMARTBROKER+ Akademie, which explains the platform and its order types, and the Wiki, a glossary of financial terms. Both are competent, both are introductory, and neither will teach an experienced investor anything. There is no demo account, which for a broker courting first-timers is a genuine omission.

Support is the best of the three big cheap German brokers, which is a low bar cleared rather than a triumph. There is a published telephone number (+49 30 257 708 403), an email address, a complaints department with its own postal address and mailbox, and a structured FAQ. Everything is German only, during business hours. VIP clients from 45 trades a quarter get a named contact with direct contact details, which is the single most valuable non-price feature in the VIP package.

The history matters here. During the 2023 migration to Baader Bank, support was overwhelmed for weeks and this was the dominant complaint in the German community. It has since been rebuilt, and Finanztip's reinstatement of the recommendation in October 2024 is a reasonable third-party signal that the problem is behind them.

Two line items in the price list are worth flagging as a matter of tone: a copy of a recorded call costs EUR 100 and an address trace is billed at EUR 100 an hour, both only where the client caused the request. Neither will affect most people; both tell you something about how the firm thinks about servicing edge cases.