XTB in Portugal

What XTB is

XTB is a Polish broker listed on the Warsaw stock exchange, with more than twenty years of history. It is the only one of the four brokers we compare that operates in Portugal through a branch of its own: XTB, S.A. Sucursal em Portugal is registered in Lisbon under number 980436613 and with the CMVM under number 341, on top of being supervised by the KNF, the Polish regulator.

That has one practical consequence worth understanding before you open an account: you can check its status in the Portuguese regulator’s own public register, which you cannot do with a broker operating here purely under the European passport. It is an advantage in transparency, not a guarantee over your money, which is the subject of the safety section below.

The account gives you access to two very different things. On one side, real shares and ETFs on organised markets, which is the product most people come here for. On the other, CFDs on shares, indices, commodities, currencies and crypto, which are leveraged contracts where you never actually own the asset. Same screen, opposite risk regimes.

Where the 0% stops being 0%

The 0% commission on shares and ETFs is not a permanent price, it is a monthly allowance. The official fee table sets it at 0%, with a €0 minimum, up to €100,000 of accumulated trading volume in a month, adding up all of the client’s registered accounts. Past that figure, the part that exceeds it pays 0.2%, with a €10 minimum per order.

The minimum is what decides almost everything, and XTB demonstrates it itself in the worked example in its own table: a client who has already traded €95,000 that month places a €7,500 order, the excess is €2,500, and because 0.2% of €2,500 is €5, the €10 minimum is charged instead. On the excess portion, the effective commission was 0.40%, double the advertised rate. The minimum only stops biting once the excess passes €5,000, because that is where 0.2% equals €10.

For the overwhelming majority of private investors, €100,000 a month is a limit they never come close to. It is worth knowing it exists for two reasons: it counts volume, not profit, so anyone who trades often reaches it without investing large sums; and it adds up all accounts, so opening a second one does not double it.

The cost that stays: currency conversion

At a commission-free broker the price has moved, it has not disappeared. Here it sits in the currency conversion: 0.5% of the amount converted, every time you buy an asset quoted in a currency other than your account’s. And it is charged in both directions, because you convert again on the way out, so a full round trip in a dollar share or ETF costs about 1% of the amount. On a $10,000 purchase and sale that is roughly $100, when the trading commission was zero at both ends.

There is one detail that appears only in the official table and that we could not find published anywhere: the rate rises to 0.8% on conversions made at weekends, between 22:00 on Friday and 23:00 on Sunday, and on holidays when there is no currency quotation. That is 60% more than on a working day, and on a €10,000 conversion the difference is €50 against €80. Buying a dollar asset on a Saturday costs more than buying it the following Monday.

The practical reading is simple. If you invest in euro-quoted assets, and the Portuguese market and a good share of UCITS ETFs are in that position, the conversion never applies and XTB is genuinely cheap. If you buy mostly in dollars, the 0.5% is your real cost and there are brokers charging a fraction of it, albeit with per-order minimums that punish small purchases.

One calculation almost nobody runs before opening an account is the deposit itself. The table charges 0.70% on debit or credit card transfers and 0.85% on online payments, with only a bank transfer free. Funding €1,000 by card costs €7, at a broker advertising zero commission. The commercial page summarises the deposit row as "Gratuito" and prints the table with these figures directly underneath it.

The maintenance fee that only exists in the price list

XTB advertises account opening and maintenance as free, and the full sentence on the page carries a condition that is easy to miss: free "for all active clients". The official table says the rest. The monthly maintenance fee is "free or up to €10", and the €10 is only charged when two conditions hold at the same time: no position opened or closed in the last 365 days, and no deposit at all in the last 90 days.

Because they are cumulative, either one avoids the fee. A single deposit of any size every three months is enough, and holding an open position on any account also exempts you, even if you do nothing for years. Anyone who forgets an account with a small balance pays €120 a year, and the table adds that where funds are insufficient the fee is charged up to whatever remains: the account empties, it does not go negative.

It is not a hidden fee, it is published. It is a condition almost nobody repeats, and it is why our own comparison pages said "no maintenance fees" without the caveat. We corrected them on the same day we wrote this one.

Is it safe?

The entity you contract with is XTB S.A., a Polish company supervised by the KNF, through its Portuguese branch registered with the CMVM under number 341. Because it is a branch and not a separate entity, your cash and securities sit under the Polish investor compensation system, not a Portuguese scheme.

XTB publishes that limit on its own page: €20,100. It is the highest of the four brokers we compare, and the exact number is worth holding on to, because several Portuguese comparison sites publish around €22,000 for the same broker. When the figures diverge, what counts is what the broker publishes, not what a comparison site writes about it.

Note what that limit is not. It is not a deposit guarantee: XTB is not a bank, so idle cash does not have the €100,000 cover it would have in a bank account. And, like any scheme of this kind, it covers the broker failing, never market losses. If you intend to leave large sums in cash in the account, this is the point to weigh.

There is a second risk, and it is not about the broker’s solidity, it is about the product. XTB is, at origin, a CFD house, and the mandatory warning it displays itself on every page states that 77% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. Leverage for retail clients is capped at 1:30 and there is negative balance protection, but none of that moves that percentage. Anyone coming for shares and ETFs should confirm they are buying the real instrument and not a contract on it.

Interest on uninvested cash

XTB pays interest on the balance sitting in your account that you have not yet invested. There is nothing to apply for and no minimum or maximum balance: interest accrues daily and is credited to the account within five working days of each month end.

The structure has two tiers. For the first 90 days from signing the contract a preferential rate applies, up to the equivalent of €100,000 of available funds across all accounts; above that amount, and from day 91, the standard rate applies.

We deliberately do not publish the rate here. XTB states that the rates are variable and revised weekly, and a page verified every three months would show an out-of-date figure most of the time. Check the rate in force on the broker’s own interest page before deciding anything on the strength of it.