If you have little time but want to learn how to trade stocks in less than two hours a day, this guide is for you. You may already be trading stocks, but how practical is it to compress your trading hours and still achieve success?

Depending on your experience of trading stocks, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

How do you know what stocks to choose and how to manage open trades?

This guide will set out a simple plan for trading stocks in two hours or less. I’ll highlight suggestions for a trading plan and a few simple strategies to help you get started.

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Seasoned traders will tell you that brokers in Europe offer some of the best trading platforms with strict regulatory measures to protect trader’s investment and ever-decreasing transaction fees. As a result, many new brokers are looking to invest in the European trading market.

However, this growing number of traders has also led to a rise in new brokers looking to benefit from the increased traffic. So, how do you differentiate the good legit brokers from those looking to scam your hard-earned cash with ridiculous commission fees on Europe’s trading scene?

Here’s a list of what I consider the best low-commission trading brokers in Europe right now. With this list and plenty of educational material to supplement your research, you’re set to start trading like a pro.

Disclaimer – I do not provide investment advice on Contract for Differences (CFDs) as they are complicated and come with a high risk of losing your money. Around 74-89% of investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. You must have a higher understanding of how CFDs work and consider whether you can afford the high risk of losing your money.

Best Low Commission European Trading Brokers

Are you looking at the top brokerages serving European traders? Here is a list of the best ones with free commission trading and low or zero withdrawal fees.

• DEGIRO – Zero commission broker with low fees on trades. DEGIRO offers some of the lowest fees on the market and is regulated by multiple top-tier authorities. It provides a web and mobile platform that is easy to use.
• eToro – Zero commission on stocks makes eToro the largest discount broker for European traders. Regulated by UK Financial Conduct Authority (the FCA), CySEC (EU), and ASIC (AU), the broker has over 12 million active users. Seamless account opening with social trading experience makes eToro a top choice.

DEGIRO – Top online trader and discount trading

Trade on DEGIRO

DEGIRO is a privately owned discount broker that was founded in 2008 in the Netherlands. The Dutch online trade platform is popular for its low trading fees and free monthly ETF trades.

Some of the top-tier authorities regulating DEGIRO operations include the Dutch Central Bank DNB and Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets AFM. Additionally, the company is duly registered by the Amsterdam-based Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

DEGIRO provides its users with bonds, options, stocks, ETFs, leveraged products, and futures. You will get access to about 50 world exchanges on this platform.

If the company’s claim on their website is anything to go by, they have industry-leading commission rates and a trading platform suitable for beginner trading. If you’re looking to cut on costs while trading, DEGIRO offers an easy-to-use platform worth considering.

Fees

Trading fees on DEGIRO are among the lowest, but you can only enjoy one monthly commission-free ETF irrespective of your trade size.

The good news is that DEGIRO has zero deposit fees and no limit on the account minimums. What’s more, it does not charge you for withdrawing earnings from the platform. DEGIRO is also one of the cheapest platforms for account maintenance – there is zero annual maintenance and custody fee charged.

On the other hand, just like many other brokers, DEGIRO charges a small fee on international ETF trading. The charge includes a €2 cost in addition to 0.03% of the value of your order. The charges on stock trading vary widely, but they’re lower than the industry averages.

For instance, trading stock on the London Stock Exchange will cost you €1.75 and an additional 0.022%. If you were to go for another broker, say Xetra, it would cost you €4.00 and an additional 0.05%.

On DEGIRO, you’ll part with €2.5 as an annual connection fee for each exchange – except for the Irish Stock Exchange – and an extra 0.10% of the traded amount as a currency exchange fee.

DEGIRO features

• Low trading fees
• Products on offer include bonds, options, futures, shares, leveraged products.
• Regulated by AFM
• No minimum account deposits
• No inactivity fee
• 24-hour trading
• Supports EUR, CHF, GBP, NOK, SEK, CZK, PLN, HUF and DKK.

Trade on DEGIRO

eToro – Zero-commission on Stocks

Trade on eToro

Your capital is at risk. Other fees apply. For more information, visit etoro.com/trading/fees.

eToro was formed in 2007 and has grown to become the largest international broker with over 12 million traders. It provides EU and UK traders with commission-free trading on stocks and ETFs. The platform offers a wide range of products, including cryptocurrencies, indices, forex, and commodities, at very favorable spreads.

Having been in the industry for over 13 years, eToro stands out as a reputable trading broker. Three top-tier authorities regulate it, including ASIC of AU, CySEC of EU, and FCA in the UK. Due to the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission regulation of eToro, investors have up to €20,000 protection. The UK regulator, on the other hand, protects up to €85,000.

Fees

If you’re looking for an investment brokerage with the lowest fees, eToro beats them all. The platform charges zero fees when you open or close a stock trade. This is for the non-leveraged positions.

It is worth noting that eToro’s USD-based accounts incur a flat rate fee of $5.00 on withdrawals. Unfortunately, deposits made in other currencies will have to incur an additional conversion fee.

eToro is a multi-asset platform that allows you to invest in stocks and crypto-assets as well as trading CFD assets.

eToro features

• Zero commission on stocks and low transaction fees
• Wide range of products, including forex, cryptocurrencies, CFDs, stocks, and indices
• Excluding Serbia, all other European countries are supported
• Regulated by FCA, CySEC, ASIC
• Minimum deposit amounts of $200
• Has a demo account for beginner traders to do some training
• Charges a $10 inactivity fee for accounts that stay logged out for a year
• Copy portfolios are designed to minimize your risk long-term while pointing you towards new opportunities
• Copy-trading is available
• Fractional shares are available

Trade on eToro

Investing in stocks, bonds, and ETFs involves risks including complete loss. Please do your research before making any investment.

Disclaimer: eToro is a multi-asset platform which offers both investing in stocks and cryptoassets, as well as trading CFDs.

Please note that CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 76% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

Past performance is not an indication of future results. Trading history presented is less than 5 complete years and may not suffice as basis for investment decision.

Copy Trading does not amount to investment advice. The value of your investments may go up or down.
Your capital is at risk.

Cryptoasset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.

Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong. Take 2 mins to learn more.

eToro USA LLC does not offer CFDs and makes no representation and assumes no liability as to the accuracy or completeness of the content of this publication, which has been prepared by our partner utilizing publicly available non-entity specific information about eToro.

Conclusion

Online trading allows you to invest your money in products whose performance you can track in real-time. Different brokerage firms vary in the way they charge for their services. These charges can be a deal-breaker when it comes to choosing your ideal platform.

DEGIRO is outstanding for its low fees and overall ease of use. eToro has an outstanding reputation as a commission-free platform with a plethora of features.

That said, your favorite platform should be based on your needs. Generally, the brokers mentioned above provide the industry’s best services in Europe.

Investing in stocks, bonds, and ETFs involves risks including complete loss. Please do your research before making any investment.

Trade with $0 commissions on Firstrade

It’s no secret that an excellent trading platform is an essential factor in the success of any trader. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the Firstrade platform, which has recently gained popularity in the past few months.

If you are interested to know whether this might be the platform for you, continue reading below. I’ll provide you with a comprehensive review of the Firstrade platform to identify if it’s worth trying or not.

Firstrade Platform Background

Before anything else, let’s take a closer look at what Firstrade is. The company was established in 1985 in Queens, New York. It initially focused on serving local communities, particularly those of ethnic immigrants. In the past few years, they switched to $0 commissions for options and stock trades.

Pros:

• $0 options and stock trades
• Easy to navigate trading experience
• Supports multiple regions

Cons:

• Limited mobile and web platform functionalities
• No crypto, forex, and futures option trading
• Limited customer support

[Read more…]

One of the best tricks for living a happy life is to turn off the news. This includes social media feeds. Both mediums are designed to constantly bombard you with sensational elements to keep you hooked. They are not the source of truth or any useful information.

The same goes for stock investing. There are TV channels dedicated to talking about stocks 24/7, but you need to avoid them. You also need to understand that historically stock picking has been a losing game.

Why Stock Picking Fails

Two words: Market Efficiency

Stock prices are constantly adjusting to the news that is available to all market participants. Without insider information, it’s impossible to predict future news. Can you tell if Apple will fall above or below their next earnings forecast? I don’t think so. If you had that magical ability, you’d be wealthy beyond imagination.

Stock pickers wrongly presume there are mispriced stocks that can be identified in advance and exploited for profit. They don’t realize that virtually all of the information about a stock, a sector, or an economy is very quickly digested by the entirety of market participants and swiftly embedded into the price of that security.

Because information is available so quickly, you never have an advantage over the millions of other market participants. Stocks are always “priced fairly” given the current information that is available. This market efficiency ensures the prices agreed upon between willing buyers and willing sellers are the best estimate of fair market values.
In other words, when you try to buy underpriced “winners” or sell overpriced “losers,” you have to think the person on the other side of the trade is misinformed or stupid. Why else would they be taking the opposite position?

Read more: How to buy tokenized stocks through crypto exchanges

Millions of investors, and an army of brokers, believe their own personal version of this fairy tale. And when someone indicates that they are beating the market while selecting individual stocks, they are also confessing the belief that the market is composed of fools.

Consider an online newsletter that shares “insider secrets” and recommends certain stocks. What are they basing these recommendations on? The only information they have is widely available to the public, for free.

If the newsletter worked, why would the author be sharing that information? Why not just keep the secret and make a fortune picking stocks? Furthermore, if the recommendations were sound, who on earth would be willing to part with a stock rated “buy” and sell it to you? And what kind of dimwit would later buy when the recommendation was to sell?

The reason that newsletters underperform the market is the same reason that individual investors underperform the market. They overestimate their knowledge and ability to predict the future.

Remember, when you decide to buy and sell stocks, you’re competing against Warren Buffett, the giant Yale endowment fund, corporate insiders, and an army of PhD quants who stare at numbers for 14 hours each day. Why do you think you have more information than the professionals on the other side of the trade?

And even if you somehow did know more than those people, what makes you think that anyone can predict the future prices of any given stock? You can’t! And neither can most professionally managed mutual funds and hedge funds.

Research on the Failure of Stock Picking

Research shows that from 1975 to 2006, 99.4% of portfolio managers displayed no evidence of genuine stock-picking skill, and the 0.6% of managers who did outperform the index were “statistically indistinguishable from zero”.

This doesn’t mean that no mutual funds have beaten the market in recent years. Some have done so repeatedly over periods as short as a year or two. But the number of funds that have beaten the market over their entire histories is so small that the False Discovery Rate test can’t eliminate the possibility that the few that did were merely false positives, in other words, they got lucky.

Individuals Are Even Worse

Individual investors:

• Underperform standard benchmarks (e.g., a low-cost index fund)
• Sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition effect”)
• Are heavily influenced by limited attention and past return performance in their purchase decisions
• Engage in naïve reinforcement learning by repeating past behaviors that coincided with pleasure while avoiding past behaviors that generated pain
• Tend to hold undiversified stock portfolios

These behaviors deleteriously affect the financial well-being of individual investors.

Individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. Of 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker during 1991 to 1996, those that traded most earned an annual return of 11.4 percent, while the market returned 17.9 percent. Overconfidence can explain high trading levels and the resulting poor performance of individual investors.

Read more: The best online stock brokers in Europe

Most investors also underperform the market by choosing to chase after hot companies that receive loads of publicity.

In their book Creative Destruction, Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan analyzed the companies of the original S&P 500 Index created in 1957. Quite shockingly, only 74 of the original companies remained on the list in 1997, and just 12 of them ended up with returns that outperformed the index for the 41-year period through 1998. 12 out of 500!

Keep in mind that these 500 companies are some of the biggest and most influential in the world. They are not small, distressed firms that you’ve never heard of. They are giants that people love to talk about. Just think about how many people bought the stock of these “safe investments” while trying to outperform the index.

And the authors sum up the problem with stock picking quite well:

As the ’80s passed and we made our way through the ‘90s, both of us observed that almost as soon as any company had been praised in the popular management literature as excellent or somehow super durable, it began to deteriorate.

If you still aren’t convinced, have a look at the 2010 study “Stocks of Admired Companies and Spurned Ones” by Meir Statman and Deniz Anginer.

The study was based on Fortune Magazine’s annual list of “America’s Most Admired Companies” from 1983 to 2007. The authors created two portfolios from the data, with one representing the most admired companies and the other representing the “spurned” or least admired companies. The “admired” portfolio contained the stocks with the highest Fortune ratings (which were popular companies like Disney and Google), and the “spurned” portfolio contained the stocks with the lowest Fortune ratings (which were no-name companies like Jet Blue and Bridgestone).

Can you guess the outcome?

Stocks of admired companies had lower returns, on average, than stocks of spurned companies. 16.12% annualized return of the spurned portfolio versus the 13.81% annualized return of the admired portfolio over the nearly 25 year span.

Not only that, but they found exactly the same results as the authors above.

We find that increases in admiration were followed, on average, by lower returns.

More media coverage and hype results in more popularity, which causes more people to buy the stock. This results in higher stock prices and ultimately, lower future returns.
Conclusion

The research is clear. Investors lose when they trade frequently and attempt to pick stocks. Keep in mind that even if someone could outperform the market by selecting individual stocks, they’d likely still underperform after accounting for taxes and transaction costs.

And how about the million-dollar question: If stock picking is so hopelessly futile, why does the media continue talking about it? Why do brokers continue selling it? Why do individual investors keep chasing it?

Read more: Index Investing for European Investors

A couple of reasons actually.

People are suckers who love a good story. Research and reason don’t sell magazines.  No big brokerage firm is going to place a full-page ad that says, “Trading your portfolio with us will cost you a fortune over time in fees and expenses, therefore you’re almost guaranteed to underperform an appropriate index fund.” No, they keep hawking the latest high-tech mutual fund, selling the dream while collecting those fees.

People desperately want to be better than the average, and smarter than the next investor, even though they probably aren’t either.

The best way to win this game is by refusing to play it. Invest in a global mix of low-expense ETFs via a good broker like DEGIRO and you’re good to go.

And Yet… I Still Pick Stocks

While all the evidence seems to be in favor of using low-cost index funds, the truth is that there are plenty of investors that have made big returns by picking stocks.

By going with the masses and choosing an index fund, you will only get average returns. This might be a fine strategy if you are adopting a defensive position, perhaps a bit later in life when you’ve already achieved your desired level of wealth and just want to grow it slowly over time.

All the wealthy people I know have either invested a huge chunk of their time and energy (10 years+) into a single project that becomes their golden egg, or picked a few stocks early in their trajectory and multiplied their money many times over. Even more common is a combination of both of these strategies – investing time in a business that eventually makes a lot of money, then investing part of that money into stocks or other businesses and multiplying the original wealth with minimal additional effort.

This strategy works well because these kinds of people are provably high performers that tend to be among the best and most informed in their industry, and they can spot new trends and markets before anyone else can. And therein lies possibly the only instance where the efficient market hypothesis breaks down.

What these people are doing is not stock picking in reality, and they tend not to care much about stock prices at all. They are applying their experience, connections, and vision to identify where the world is going, then betting on the companies that have already gained a foothold in those new trends.

Adopting such a strategy is especially well suited to tech investors because among all industries the tech industry is probably the most open and well discussed. While many commentators have long spoken of the tech bubble, and that investing in tech only works until it doesn’t, I believe that every company is now becoming a tech company, and this is not a trend that will end soon. For example, we have an upcoming monetary revolution that is driven by, guess what, new technology – in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other protocols that are upending a very low-tech and tightly controlled monetary system.

Final Thoughts

So yes, in general, stock picking is a loser’s game and the chances of you making money in the long run by picking stocks are slim. However, if you’re lucky you can strike it big, so if you fit a certain profile, then stock picking might work for you.

As for me, I combine my deep knowledge of the tech industry together with that of nascent technologies like crypto, as well as my natural interest in spending time reading about investments, in order to try and generate outsized returns. So far, so good, but will it work long-term or will I spectacularly lose it all at some point? Only time will tell…

If you’ve been investing in cryptoassets for some time, you might have amassed some good gains in Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies.

You might be considering rebalancing your portfolio so that crypto isn’t overly dominant, but there is one major problem. Banks still don’t like to deal with crypto exchanges, and you can have problems passing fiat currency through your bank account after withdrawing from an exchange. If your intention is to invest in stocks with that money, you can now bypass the banks entirely by using stablecoins to move money to an exchange that offers stock trading and accepts crypto deposits.

Buy fractional stocks on eToro

Securities trading offered by eToro USA Securities, Inc. (“the BD”), member of FINRA and SIPC.
Cryptocurrency offered by eToro USA LLC (“the MSB”) (NMLS: 1769299) and is not FDIC or SIPC
insured. Investing involves risk.

Read more: How to buy crypto from a traditional stock broker

On the other hand, you can also buy traditional stocks from platforms that allow trading in both cryptos and stocks, with eToro being my favorite for this purpose. The big advantage with buying stocks in eToro is that you can buy fractional stocks. Some stocks have risen so much over the years that they have become inaccessible to many investors. The solution is fractionalization. Not many stockbrokers offer this service, but eToro is one of them.

Of course, eToro also allows you to use your crypto deposits to buy full stocks (not fractions).

So what you would do in this case is to transfer your crypto to eToro, sell it for Euro or USD, then use those funds to buy stocks within eToro itself.

If you’d like to learn more about how eToro works, please head over to my in-depth review of eToro for a comprehensive look at what you can do on this popular platform.

Buy stocks on eToro

Disclaimer: Your capital is at risk.

What are your thoughts? Have you found any other ways of buying stocks with crypto?