CapTrader

CapTrader's pricing is Interactive Brokers' pricing plus a service margin, and it is worth seeing the size of that margin before deciding whether it is worth paying.

German equities and ETFs cost 0.10% of trade value with a EUR 4.00 minimum and a EUR 99.00 cap on Xetra. Interactive Brokers charges 0.05% with a EUR 1.25 minimum and a EUR 29.00 cap for the same order. On a EUR 10,000 Xetra trade that is EUR 10.00 at CapTrader against EUR 5.00 direct. What softens the comparison is venue choice: Tradegate, gettex, Chi-X, BATS and Turquoise DE carry the same 0.10% but only a EUR 2.00 minimum, so small German orders are cheap if you route them away from Xetra. Frankfurt adds a specialist fee of 0.0504% (minimum EUR 2.52) and Stuttgart carries a EUR 5.90 minimum.

US shares are USD 0.01 per share, minimum USD 2.00, capped at 1.0% of trade value, with SEC and FINRA charges passed through on sales. A 300-share order costs USD 3.00.

Derivatives are where CapTrader stops looking expensive. Eurex equity and index options are EUR 2.00 per contract with volume pricing above 1,000 contracts a month, US options USD 3.50, Eurex futures EUR 2.00, the Mini-DAX EUR 1.00 and CME Micro E-minis USD 1.25. Against German competitors those are strong numbers, and the free AgenaTrader Andromeda and TraderFox licences add real value on top.

The recurring costs are the ones to watch. Currency conversion is 0.3 basis points with a EUR 3.75 minimum — converting EUR 5,000 into dollars costs EUR 3.75, where IBKR direct would charge USD 2.00. There is no account fee, no custody fee and no inactivity fee, deposits are free, and one withdrawal per calendar month is free before EUR 1.00 SEPA / EUR 8.00 wire charges begin. Real-time market data is a separate monthly subscription per exchange, and telephone orders — permitted only to close positions — cost EUR 30 on top of commission.

CapTrader has a two-layer structure, and understanding it is the single most important thing about the record.

Layer one is CapTrader GmbH itself: Elberfelder Straße 2, 40213 Düsseldorf, registered at Amtsgericht Düsseldorf under HRB 86537, supervised by BaFin under institution number 10156708 and a member of the Entschädigungseinrichtung der Wertpapierhandelsunternehmen (EdW). CapTrader intermediates and services the relationship; it does not custody your assets.

Layer two is Interactive Brokers, which executes, clears and holds everything. Which IBKR entity depends on where you live. EEA residents — Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the rest — are booked at Interactive Brokers Ireland Limited (Central Bank of Ireland, reference C423427), where the Irish Investor Compensation Scheme pays 90% of an eligible net loss up to EUR 20,000. Residents outside the EEA, including Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UK, are booked at Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited (FCA 208159) with FSCS cover up to GBP 85,000. That is an unusual inversion: the Swiss client gets four times the compensation cover of the German one.

Both figures protect against firm failure and misappropriation, not against market losses, and neither is a guarantee. Fully paid securities are held at custodians in accounts designated for clients, cash is segregated and reconciled daily, IBKR holds no proprietary trading book, and retail negative balance protection applies under EU rules.

CapTrader itself is privately held and does not publish audited financial statements, so the transparency you can inspect is IBKR's rather than CapTrader's. The company traces its origins to a 1997 asset-management firm; the CapTrader brokerage brand launched in 2011 and has operated as an independent GmbH since 2019.

This is the decisive local factor and CapTrader is completely explicit about it: the Abgeltungsteuer is not withheld.

Because the securities account sits legally at Interactive Brokers in Ireland rather than at a German institution, CapTrader is not subject to the German pre-emptive withholding obligation. Gains from every closed trade are credited to your account in full. Only foreign withholding tax on dividends is deducted at source, and the W-8BEN form reduces the US portion.

The upside is genuine and compounding. If you turn over your capital several times a year, the roughly 26.4% (25% plus Solidaritätszuschlag, plus church tax where applicable) that a German broker would deduct after every profitable trade stays invested until the following year's tax assessment. Over a high-turnover year the difference is not cosmetic.

The downside is equally genuine. You are responsible for declaring capital income yourself through Anlage KAP, using the annual transaction and activity statements CapTrader and IBKR provide. There is no Verlustverrechnungstopf managed for you, no automatic Sparerpauschbetrag, and a Freistellungsauftrag cannot be filed — the allowance is claimed in the return instead. Loss offsetting follows German rules per asset class: equity losses only offset equity gains, while forex losses can be netted against other capital income.

Anyone who files a straightforward return and holds three ETFs will find this an unnecessary annual chore. Anyone running an options book, a trading GmbH or a high-turnover strategy will usually find the deferral worth more than the paperwork costs. Budget for a tax adviser in the first year if your statement runs to hundreds of pages, and note that CapTrader sells a dedicated tax-report package for company accounts.

CapTrader hands you the entire Interactive Brokers software stack and then adds third-party licences on top, all free.

Trader Workstation is the flagship: more than 60 order types and algorithms, ComboTrader for multi-leg options, OptionTrader, ProbabilityLab, StrategyLab, ScaleTrader, BasketTrader, BookTrader, ChartTrader, FXTrader and Risk Navigator for portfolio-level risk. It is the same terminal professional desks use, and the first session is genuinely intimidating. CapTrader Desktop exists precisely for people who want the routing and pricing without that surface area.

On mobile there are two apps by design. The CapTrader Trading App carries the full order ticket, options chains, watchlists and alerts; the Easy App is deliberately stripped back for buy-and-hold investors who want to check a portfolio and place an occasional order.

The extras are the differentiator. AgenaTrader in the Andromeda edition — a serious charting and semi-automated strategy platform — is free for CapTrader clients, as is the TraderFox Trading-Desk, a German screening tool that would otherwise be a paid subscription. TradingView connects directly for order entry from charts, and the Quant4You Trading Terminal is available for systematic traders.

For automation, the full Interactive Brokers API (Python, Java, C++, C#) and FIX CTCI connectivity are available, along with IBot voice-driven order entry. A free demo account mirrors the live environment.

The honest caveat: none of this software is CapTrader's own. Platform stability, outages and feature roadmaps are Interactive Brokers' responsibility, and CapTrader can support you through a problem but cannot fix it.

The product range is Interactive Brokers' range, which is to say it is close to exhaustive: more than 160 market destinations and over 1.2 million tradable instruments.

• Shares and ETFs across German, European, North American, Asian and Australian venues, with fractional shares on US and selected European names
• Options on equities, indices and futures — Eurex, Cboe, and more than thirty other market centres
• Futures and futures options on index, rate, energy, metal and agricultural underlyings, including the Micro and Mini contract families
• Forex across the major and most minor pairs, priced from EUR 3.75 per conversion
• Bonds — CapTrader publishes access to more than one million fixed-income instruments through the IBKR bond scanner, from EUR 8.00 in Europe
• Funds — more than 37,000 mutual funds worldwide
• Warrants and certificates on Frankfurt and Stuttgart from EUR 6.00
• CFDs on shares, indices and forex: Eurozone shares 0.10% with a EUR 4.00 minimum, US CFDs 1 cent per contract with a USD 2.00 minimum, with long financing quoted at 4.67% in EUR and 6.13% in USD as of 20 August 2026 and an additional 1% spread applied to MiFID retail clients

The conspicuous gap is spot crypto. EEA clients cannot buy coins here; the available exposure is Bitcoin futures (USD 8.00 per contract on CFE, USD 25.00 on the CME BRR contract) and exchange-traded products.

Account structures cover more ground than most German brokers: individual and joint accounts, the Familiendepot consolidating several family accounts under one structure, a Firmendepot for GmbH, UG, AG and partnership entities with a dedicated tax-report package, and managed accounts for clients who do not want to trade themselves. Cash accounts are available from 18; margin accounts unlock short selling, options, futures and real-time margining.

Opening is fully online and asks for your German tax identification number, proof of identity and proof of address — the latter either verified digitally or uploaded as a bank statement or utility bill less than six months old. As at any Interactive Brokers account, a trading-experience questionnaire per asset class determines which permissions get switched on. Most applications clear in one to three business days.

The EUR 2,000 minimum deposit is a real filter and higher than most German competitors, which increasingly ask for nothing at all. Funding is bank transfer only — SEPA in euros, wire otherwise. There are no cards, no PayPal and no instant-funding rails, so expect one to two business days for a SEPA credit rather than seconds. Deposits are free; one withdrawal per calendar month is free, and further withdrawals cost EUR 1.00 by SEPA or EUR 8.00 by wire.

Support is the reason most people choose CapTrader over IBKR direct. The service desk runs Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 20:00 CET on a free German hotline (0800 8723370, internationally 00800 08723370), plus live chat on the website, email, and a callback booking service. Much of the team holds Eurex trader certification, which shows in the quality of derivatives answers. Outside those hours you fall back to Interactive Brokers' regional emergency desks, which exist to close positions rather than to help.

Public sentiment supports the claim: CapTrader carries a 4.9 Trustpilot rating from more than 800 reviews, and service is the recurring theme in the positive ones. Set against Interactive Brokers' own reputation for slow, template-driven ticket handling, this is the clearest thing CapTrader sells.

Education is respectable rather than exceptional — webinars, seminars, a glossary, a help centre and a research and analysis blog covering DAX and US market outlooks, plus a free demo account for platform practice.