Saxo vs CapTrader — which broker is better?

Pros

• Full Danish banking licence (Finanstilsynet licence 1149) and SIFI designation — a stronger structural safeguard than a broker-only permission
• US stocks and ETFs at 0.08% with a USD 1 minimum on the entry-level Classic tier, and 0.05%/0.03% at higher tiers
• Roughly 71,000 instruments including 23,000 stocks, 7,400 ETFs, 5,200 bonds, 3,100 listed options and 250 futures across 50-plus exchanges
• SaxoTraderGO and the mobile app are the best-designed retail trading interfaces in Europe, and the app is not a cut-down version of the web platform
• Mutual funds carry no transaction commission, no custody fee and no platform fee
• One of very few retail platforms with a genuinely usable bond offering — 5,200 government and corporate issues with live prices
• No inactivity fee, no minimum deposit on Classic, and free withdrawals
• Majority-owned by J. Safra Sarasin since 2026, adding a large private-banking group behind the balance sheet

Cons

• Currency conversion costs 0.25% over mid-market for EU and Swiss clients, and up to 0.60% at the UK entity's Classic tier — the single largest hidden cost for cross-currency investors
• A holding fee of up to 0.15% a year on shares, ETFs and bonds still applies at several booking entities; coverage varies by country and is easy to overlook
• No spot cryptocurrency trading — exposure is limited to exchange-traded products
• No fractional shares on ordinary orders, so building small positions in high-priced US stocks is awkward
• Bank transfer is the only funding route since card deposits were withdrawn in April 2025
• Trustpilot sentiment sits around 3.8 with responsiveness of support the recurring complaint, despite good published coverage

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