CapTrader vs Fidelity Investments — which broker is better?

Pros

• BaFin-supervised German investment firm (institution number 10156708) with a Düsseldorf address, German contract law and a free German hotline until 20:00
• Eurex options and futures at EUR 2.00 per contract, Mini-DAX futures at EUR 1.00 and CME Micro E-minis at USD 1.25 — competitive with anything available to German retail traders
• Access to over 160 market destinations, more than 1.2 million instruments, one million-plus bonds and 37,000 funds from a single multi-currency account
• No account fee, no custody fee, no inactivity fee, and free real accounts on TWS, CapTrader Desktop, AgenaTrader Andromeda and the TraderFox Trading-Desk
• German shares on Tradegate, gettex, Chi-X and Turquoise DE from a EUR 2.00 minimum — noticeably cheaper than the EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum for small orders
• Trustpilot rating of 4.9 from more than 800 reviews, with support consistently named as the reason
• Interactive Brokers' execution stack underneath: SmartRouting, real-time margining, more than 60 order types and a mature API

Cons

• No Abgeltungsteuer is withheld. German investors gain a compounding advantage but must declare everything themselves via Anlage KAP, and a Freistellungsauftrag is not possible — for many people that alone rules CapTrader out
• Commissions are a visible markup on Interactive Brokers' own schedule: 0.10% with a EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum against IBKR's 0.05% and EUR 1.25, and USD 0.01 per share against IBKR's USD 0.0035
• Currency conversion costs 0.3 basis points with a EUR 3.75 minimum — one and a half times what IBKR charges direct, and the minimum bites on every small conversion
• Investor compensation for EEA clients is the Irish scheme's 90% of EUR 20,000, thin against the German EUR 100,000 deposit guarantee investors are used to
• EUR 2,000 minimum deposit and per-order minimums make small, regular ETF purchases uneconomic; there are no free savings plans
• No spot crypto — only Bitcoin futures and exchange-traded products — and real-time market data is a paid monthly subscription per exchange

Pros

• USD 0 online US stock and ETF commissions, and Fidelity does not accept payment for order flow on equity orders
• Zero-expense-ratio index mutual funds (the FZROX family) — no other major US broker matches this on fund cost
• Options exercise and assignment cost USD 0, and buy-to-close orders at USD 0.65 or less are free
• No outgoing account transfer fee, no domestic wire fee and no inactivity or maintenance fee
• Idle cash defaults into the SPAXX money market fund rather than a near-zero bank sweep, so uninvested balances earn a market-linked yield without manual intervention
• International trading in 25 markets with settlement in 16 currencies, at GBP 9 for the UK and EUR 19 for euro-zone markets
• Best-in-class research: roughly seven third-party report providers plus the proprietary Equity Summary Score, and consistently rated first for research and education
• Fractional share investing from USD 1 across a broad US universe, not just large-cap index constituents

Cons

• No futures, no futures options and no retail forex — a hard stop for macro and commodity traders
• No paper trading or simulator, so there is no way to rehearse a strategy inside the platform
• Crypto is limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin with a spread of up to 1% built into the price, and is not SIPC-protected
• New accounts are effectively US residents only; Fidelity states it does not open accounts for customers residing outside the United States and restricts existing accounts when clients move abroad
• Charting and drawing tools in Trader+ are weaker than thinkorswim's, and there is no backtesting engine
• The FX markup on international trades settled in USD starts at a full 100 basis points below USD 100,000 — expensive for small foreign orders