What makes the $500 minimum even worse is users who joined before April 2017 have a minimum of $50 for stocks.
When I see people complaining about the platform I always ask what makes them stay, they always say it is the very simple easy of use and the social side which keeps them there…I believe without it Etoro wouldn’t be what it is.
When I joined etoro I only traded cryptos and wanted to take advantage of etoro’s leverage…at the time I think they had lower spreads as well, not the 5% they have now. I’d never traded stocks before but after I seen AMD and Nvidia, with being a gamer and into crypto I wanted to buy some. Being new to trading I was using x5/x10 leverage which looking back was stupid but luckily for me the tech bullrun went crazy so I made over 150% profit on my account in 2017. By the end of the year I’d already felt the risks of using high leverage and stopped using x10. But as I couldn’t afford $500 at x1 I stuck to using x5
The problem for me came around Feb/march this year with the big -10% nasdaq100 selloff. While I made 30% gains in January I made a loss of 26% in March. This is when I realised it was impossible for me, with only afew thousand dollars in my account to do any low risk trading on the platform. Now that my first real year of trading is over, i’m much more experienced to know that I need to quit while i’m ahead with the high leverage trading a find a new platform which caters for smaller investors without the extortionate fees. I searched and searched for weeks and the only thing I found was robinhood (US only). After weeks of looking id practically gave up, until one day i was sat bored at work and randomly typed ‘Free Trade UK’ into google…Everything changed haha
When I signed up I was around 23k in the queue but after finding out I could bump the queue by referrals I invited all the UK traders I know…I Think i’m around 230 now and literally can’t wait to start trading here.
The moral of the story here is yes i’ve used etoro for over a year and would recommend saying well away if you are a small investor or don’t fancy paying $500 minimum for a stock…