XTB

XTB's headline is simple and genuinely good: zero commission on real stocks and ETFs up to EUR 100,000 of turnover per calendar month. Above that, only the excess is charged, at 0.2% with a EUR 10 minimum. A EUR 110,000 month costs EUR 20 in total - nothing on the first EUR 100,000, 0.2% on the last EUR 10,000. For any realistic retail investor the commission is zero.

The cost that actually bites is currency conversion at 0.5%, rising to 0.8% at weekends and on public holidays. This is charged on the XTB exchange rate whenever the instrument's currency differs from your account currency. Work through it: a EUR-denominated investor buying EUR 5,000 of Apple pays roughly EUR 25 on entry and roughly EUR 25 on exit. That is EUR 50 on a round trip that XTB advertises as commission-free, and it is more than three times what Trading 212 charges for the same conversion at 0.15%.

The other charges are modest but real:

• Inactivity fee: EUR 10 per month after 365 days without a trade and 90 days without a deposit. Waived on ISA accounts and zero-balance accounts.
• Withdrawals are free at any amount at XTB S.A., the Polish entity these figures describe. At XTB Limited (Cyprus) a EUR 10 fee applies below EUR 100.
• Deposits are free and there is no minimum deposit and no platform fee.
• Custody fee: 0.2% a year, minimum EUR 10 per calendar month, and it applies only to the part of your average daily portfolio value above EUR 250,000. The fee schedule's own example charges EUR 10 on an average value of EUR 300,000. Below the threshold there is nothing to pay.
• CFDs are spread-priced, with EUR/USD averaging around 0.9 pips on the Standard account, plus daily swap points on positions held overnight.

The honest summary: XTB is cheap if you trade instruments denominated in your own account currency and expensive if you do not. European investors buying European-listed accumulating ETFs pay close to nothing until the portfolio passes EUR 250,000 and the custody fee starts. European investors buying US stocks pay 1% round-trip in FX alone.

XTB's structure is anchored on Poland and the group is publicly listed, which is a stronger governance position than most of its competitors occupy.

• XTB S.A. holds the Polish KNF licence DDM-M-4021-57-1/2005, held continuously since 2005, and serves most EEA clients directly or through passported branches - including Germany, Austria and Spain. Polish clients are covered by the national investor compensation scheme run through KDPW; the exact cover depends on your entity, so confirm it in your client agreement rather than assuming.
• XTB Limited holds FCA firm reference 522157 for UK clients, with FSCS investment cover of GBP 85,000. XTB's own UK page cites GBP 120,000, which is the FSCS deposit limit raised on 1 December 2025 and applies to cash held with a bank rather than to investments.
• XTB Limited (Cyprus) holds CySEC licence 169/12 with EUR 20,000 ICF cover.
• XTB International Limited operates under Belize FSC licence 000302/438, with Belize company registration number 153,939 - a tier-3 offshore licence. If you are onboarded here, your recourse is materially weaker than an EEA or UK client's.

The group has been listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since 2016 under XTB, publishes audited financials, segregates client money and applies negative balance protection to retail accounts under ESMA rules. It reported more than 2.16 million clients at the end of 2025.

The part that needs saying plainly is the enforcement record. 2018: a PLN 9.9m KNF fine for applying asymmetric price slippage to client orders - a practice that systematically favoured the broker. 2021: a EUR 300,000 AMF fine for compliance failures and misleading advertising. 2023: a Brazilian CVM stop order for operating without a local licence. 2026: a PLN 20m KNF fine for MiFID II breaches connected to CFD sales. Four actions in eight years from three different regulators is a pattern, not an accident, and it belongs in your decision alongside the licence list.

xStation 5 is the reason experienced traders end up at XTB despite the FX charge. It is built in-house rather than licensed, and it is the only platform in the commission-free bracket that feels designed for someone who intends to do analysis rather than just tap a buy button.

What you get in one workspace:

• A stock screener with fundamental and technical filters, which most zero-commission brokers simply do not ship.
• A market heat map covering indices and sectors, useful for orientation rather than decoration.
• Client sentiment data showing the long/short split of XTB's own book on each instrument.
• An economic calendar and integrated news feed sitting next to the chart rather than in a separate tab.
• Full charting with the standard indicator set, multiple timeframes and drawing tools, plus a trading-from-chart workflow.

Order types cover market, limit, stop, stop-limit and trailing stop, with attached take-profit and stop-loss on CFD positions. Execution statistics are published by XTB itself.

The same build ships as a downloadable desktop application for Windows and macOS, which matters if you run multiple monitors, and as a mobile app that keeps the screener, heat map and full charting rather than stripping them out. That mobile parity is genuinely rare.

The limitation is what is missing at the top end. XTB does not offer MetaTrader 4 or 5, so there is no expert advisor ecosystem, no third-party indicator marketplace and no established backtesting toolchain. There is no depth-of-market ladder and no retail algorithmic trading API. If your strategy is automated, XTB is the wrong broker regardless of how good the manual interface is.

XTB's country sites advertise between 11,700 and 12,600 instruments depending on the entity - the UK site cites 11,700+, the German site 12,600+ - of which roughly 2,600-2,700 are leveraged CFD instruments. The rest are real, cash-settled stocks and ETFs bought on exchange.

What is covered:

• Real stocks and ETFs across the major US, UK, German and other European exchanges, available fractionally so a savings plan can buy partial shares.
• CFDs on forex, indices, commodities, single stocks and ETFs, under ESMA leverage caps for retail clients.
• Crypto CFDs on the Standard account, priced through the spread with no separate commission; availability varies by entity.
• Options - a recent addition, with XTB's German site listing around 140 contracts on US stocks and ETFs. XTB does not publish a headline per-contract commission on its public fee pages, so check the ticket before you trade.
• Investment plans that automate recurring ETF purchases, which pairs well with the zero-commission structure.

What is not covered matters as much. There are no exchange-traded futures - the only futures exposure is indirect, through CFDs. There are no individual bonds, so no gilt or Bund ladder, and no mutual funds. There is no copy trading or social layer, which is a deliberate positioning choice against eToro rather than an oversight.

The practical shape of the offering: XTB is excellent if your portfolio is European stocks and ETFs plus some leveraged FX or index trading. It is incomplete if your plan requires fixed income, exchange-traded derivatives or funds.

Onboarding is among the least painful in the sector. The application is fully digital, ID verification is automated, and most EEA applicants are approved the same day. There is no minimum deposit whatsoever - you can open, fund with EUR 50, and buy a fractional share the same afternoon. Combined with fractional trading, that makes XTB genuinely accessible to someone starting from nothing, which is not true of most brokers with a platform this capable.

You will complete a MiFID appropriateness assessment. Answer it honestly; declaring no derivatives experience will restrict CFD access, which is the protection working correctly.

Funding runs through SEPA and other bank transfers, credit and debit cards, PayPal and Skrill. Card and e-wallet deposits credit instantly; SEPA transfers take one to two business days. Deposits are free. Base currencies include EUR, USD, GBP and PLN, and this choice is the most consequential decision in the whole setup: matching your account currency to the currency of the instruments you actually buy is what avoids the 0.5% conversion charge. A German investor buying UCITS ETFs in EUR on Xetra pays no conversion at all; the same investor buying US-listed stocks pays 0.5% each way.

Withdrawals are free at any amount at XTB S.A., the Polish entity these figures describe, and are processed the same business day when requested before the daily cut-off, arriving in one to two business days. Clients booked to XTB Limited (Cyprus) are the exception: there a EUR 10 fee applies below EUR 100 - a 10% cost on a EUR 99 withdrawal, which sits awkwardly against the no-minimum-deposit policy.

XTB does not act as a tax withholding agent in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, so DACH clients handle their own reporting.

XTB invests more in research and education than most brokers of its size, and the material is produced in-house rather than white-labelled.

On the research side, xStation 5 carries daily and weekly market commentary, pre-market notes, earnings previews for the larger listings and an economic calendar with consensus and prior figures. The distinctive pieces are the stock screener - fundamental and technical filters that let you actually build a shortlist rather than browse a list - the market heat map for sector and index orientation, and client sentiment data showing how XTB's own client base is positioned on each instrument. That last one is a contrarian indicator as often as a confirming one, and XTB does not over-sell it.

What is absent is deep third-party equity research. There are no full broker notes, no Morningstar-grade fund analysis and no price-target aggregation of the kind a full-service broker bundles.

On education, XTB runs a structured trading academy with graded courses covering platform mechanics, order types, technical and fundamental analysis, and risk management, plus regular live webinars in local languages that are archived afterwards. The material is competent and, importantly, spends real time on risk rather than treating it as a footnote - a meaningful distinction for a broker whose CFD sales practices have twice drawn regulatory fines.

The demo account carries the full xStation 5 feature set with virtual funds and no time pressure to convert, which makes it a legitimate way to test whether the platform suits you before funding anything.

Support is one of XTB's clearest advantages over the app-first competition, and it comes down to a simple structural difference: XTB answers the phone.

Contact runs through a phone line, email and live chat, staffed 24/5 across market hours with local-language desks in XTB's main European markets - German, Polish, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Czech and Romanian among them, alongside English. For a product that includes leveraged CFDs, where a problem can be time-critical and expensive, being able to reach a human by voice within minutes is worth more than a slightly better chat widget.

Response quality is generally reported as good, with agents able to answer platform and product questions rather than only routing tickets. XTB's local offices in its main markets mean the person answering usually understands the local tax and regulatory context, which chat-only offshore desks routinely do not.

The self-service layer is solid too. The help centre covers fees, funding, withdrawals, platform mechanics and account administration with actual numbers rather than vague reassurance - the fee and inactivity policy pages were specific enough to compile most of this record from.

Where XTB is weaker: coverage follows market hours rather than being genuinely 24/7, so weekend problems wait. And the same account-verification and withdrawal-hold frustrations that affect every regulated broker apply here too - automated compliance flags are resolved by process, not by persuading the agent on the phone. But you can at least talk to someone while it happens.