Experiences with / review of broker "degiro" (not for american and british customers)?

Manage
1

Stumbled on television advertising of “degiro.de”. It seems to be a broker with competitive prices, which covers very many stock markets. Doesn’t seem to work with american or british customers (see “international” at the bottom of the page).

Maybe it is an alternative (simpler?) to IB for me, because I do not want to trade automatically and do not need sophisticated trade algos.

Has anyone experiences with this broker?

2

J3th,

good to see more people from Germany around to share some experience on how to trade from outside of the US/Canada.

I set up an account with just2trade.com. I was simply looking for a discount broker that allows for small fees without any minimum trading volume.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any suitable German (or European) broker yet that offers trading US stocks at low prices, either.

What broker are you currently using for US stocks?

Maybe some Americans can chime in as well. It’s always a hassle to collect all the tax information, but if trading from within the US, then I might as well stay with an US account …

Best,
fips

3

fips,

since a few years, I trade US stocks with just2trade.com. No bigger problems with it, good support, simple, but only simple trading features and only about 1,000 stocks to short (about a year ago, when I did this the last time, and sometimes with high fees).

Best,
Matthias

4

Good to see someone else finding the same solution independently from one another.

Maybe I’ll stick with j2t then as well …

It’s always hard for us “non-US/UK/Canada citizens” to get access to more trading-friendly markets.

Best,
fips

5

Degiro is a Dutch company that built its own trading platform, at first for institutional clients. They started to offer their trading platform to individual investors in the Netherlands first. They got some bad pretty press here, especially at first, because they lend your shares to short sellers, but you are liable if anything goes wrong (ie the short seller cannot give you your shares back). They say they do everything they can to make it “safe”, but you have to wonder why they do not take this risk themselves then. You can opt out of this, but then the fees are quite a bit higher.

Also, I’m not sure whether they guarantee “best execution” like IB does. If that’s the case, you might lose more because of worse prices than you gain with lower commissions.

They have their own trading software, which looks to be quite a bit less powerful than IB’s TWS. It might be easier to use though.

Finally, I don’t think they are cheaper than an account at IB. See this thread: https://www.portfolio123.com/mvnforum/viewthread_thread,7899

Regards,
Peter

6

Thanks, Peter, for your review of degiro.

I studied their website now more thoroughly and found the following disadvantages:

  • not for customers in USA, GB and some other countries (outside of Europe)
  • only 2 order types: market and “limit hit order” (places the order at the exchange only if it can be executed at once and completely).
  • US- orders cost Euro .5 + USD .004/s (too expensive for penny stocks, otherwise cheap)
  • no realtime prices (for US exchanges)

With the “Custody” - feature, you can forbid that your stocks are lended to another customer for short selling (without higher fees), a very secure investment, I think.

Matthias

7

Forgot to mention: All cash is immediately transferred to “low-risk” investment fonds (I do not like that at all).

But what is the alternative? Cash is parked at a bank, which does her own business with it. And the stock investor carries in the hight of his cash the risk of the bank, as far as it is not secured. That may be worse.

Is cash secured at IB?

Matthias