Aug 22 2023

SquaredFinancial Review 2023 - The Good and the Bad
SquaredFinancial review covering their licenses, minimum deposit and withdrawal, fees, account types, platforms and more.
Compare Brokers
Vs.
By Stefano Treviso , Updated on: Apr 07 2023.
💡 Score | 2.3 out of 5. |
🏛 Regulators | CySec. |
💳 Minimum Deposit ($) | 250 |
💰 Payment Methods | Credit Card, Debit Card, Bank Transfer, Neteller, Skrill, GiroPay, Klarna, EPS, Przelewy24, EuroBank, KB. |
💵 Base Currencies | 4 - EUR, GBP, USD, PLN. |
📚 Assets Offered | 🔹 Stocks 🔹 Stock CFDs 🔹 Currency CFDs 🔹 Commodities CFDs 🔹 Indices CFDs 🔹 ETF CFDs 🔹 Crypto CFDs 🔹 Future CFDs |
💪 Retail Leverage | 1:30 |
💪 Pro Leverage | 1:500 |
✍ Custom Leverage | No |
🎲 Deleveraged Trading | Yes |
🎓 Demo Account | Yes |
💰 Commissions | Yes depending on asset (Eg: 0.99 € for real stocks in-and-out, $2.5 for Stock CFDs, etc) |
Vs.
Naga is an international broker belonging to the NAGA Group A.G, a publicly listed company in the Frankfurt stock exchange. Their specialty is social and copy trading of both real stocks and ETFs along with CFDs on all major asset classes.
Here’s what we’ll talk about during our review:
NAGA is a regulated broker that holds only 1 financial license from the Cyprus and Securities Exchange Commission.
Financial
Licenses
Regulation
Regulated
Top-tier Licenses
0
Other Licenses
1
Provided by
TheTradingBible.com
Despite NAGA being below the industry standards of our preferred brokers in terms of regulation, they have an excellent point in their favour: being a publicly traded company in Germany under the stock ticker N4G.DE which makes them act with a high degree of caution and compliance with regulatory frameworks.
We definitely look forward to NAGA acquiring new financial licenses from our top-tier regulators list.
Naga has a minimum deposit of $250 and they accept the following payment methods:
Bear in mind that it's possible that not all payment methods are available in your location. You must always check before depositing which methods are allowed in your country.
NAGA supports the following base currencies:
NAGA has quite a lengthy account offering, let's go over the basics offered on each account:
Note: Copy Premium means the money that a trader can potentially earn when someone copies his trades (it's not a cost for the trader).
NAGA charges spreads, commissions, withdrawal fees and overnight fees. Let's take a look at each one of them:
NAGA's spreads are competitive when it comes to stocks. On the other hand they charge commissions in-and-out of each trade and their currency spreads are higher than the majority of brokers in the same category.
Asset | NAGA | Pepperstone | eToro |
---|---|---|---|
EUR/USD Spread | Dynamic - From 1.7 Pips | Dynamic - From 0 to 0.77 Pips | Dynamic - From 1 Pip |
SP500 Spread | Dynamic - Market Spread | Dynamic - From 0.4 to 1.5 Pips | Dynamic - From 75 Pips |
Gold Spread | Dynamic - From 36 Pips | Dynamic - Average 13.81 Pips | Dynamic - From 45 Pips |
TSLA Spread | Dynamic - Market Spread | Dynamic - Market Spread | Dynamic - From 0.09% |
XLK Spread | Dynamic - Market Spread | Dynamic - Market Spread | Dynamic - From 0.09% |
BTC Spread | Dynamic - From $130 | Dynamic - From $30 | Dynamic - From 0.75% |
Naga has charges specific commissions per asset category, here's how it compares to similar brokers:
NAGA | Pepperstone | eToro | |
---|---|---|---|
Commissions | Yes depending on asset (Eg: 0.99 € for real stocks in-and-out, $2.5 for Stock CFDs, etc) |
| No commissions on real stocks and ETFs |
When it comes to trading with NAGA, the low stock spreads won't be enough to offset the commissions being paid on each asset class and these commissions don't come at any benefit whatsoever which is the most common case in other brokers, they offer accounts with no commissions and higher spreads along with other accounts that have commissions and lower or no spreads.
NAGA's asset offering is considered to be a moderate one when compared to similar brokers, here's how it looks:
Asset | NAGA | Pepperstone | eToro |
---|---|---|---|
Stocks | 700 | 0 | 2000 |
Stock CFDs | 700 | 1300 | 2000 |
Currency Pairs | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Currency Pair CFDs | 80 | 60 | 47 |
Commodities | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Commodities CFDs | 4 | 31 | 14 |
Indices | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Indices CFDs | 20 | 25 | 13 |
ETFs | 0 | 0 | 0 |
ETF CFDs | 17 | 100 | 145 |
Cryptocurrencies | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Cryptocurrency CFDs | 37 | 20 | 26 |
Bonds | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Bond CFDs | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Options | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Option CFDs | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Futures | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Future CFDs | 22 | 0 | 0 |
Being a broker that wants to cater to real stock traders and copy traders we definitely believe that their stock offering should be higher.
NAGA offers the following trading platforms:
Let's take a look at their proprietary platforms in more detail.
NAGA's mobile platform is quite an interesting tool packed with many features, let's go over a few of its areas in more detail.
The first area a user gets to see when successfully logging in is the TRADE section. Here users will be able to explore assets by certain custom or category-based filters and add them to their favourites list.
When touching any asset, you'll land on the asset view.
Here you'll be able to open trades, monitor the feed (where associated discussions to each asset take place) and explore the full screen charting tools (by TradingView).
When touching any of the SHORT or LONG buttons, you'll enter the order placement panel.
NAGA uses two measures to place trades:
What any professional trader knows as limit orders is called "Long or Short at specific rate" which can be accessed by touching any of the tabs that read the same text in the middle of your screen.
At the end of the order placement panel you'll be able to set stop-loss or take profit orders using two measurements:
The portfolio section (available by touching the bottom menu option) will give you a nice view of your active, pending and closed trades.
The news section is a mixture of information created by users that you follow, popular users and NAGA itself.
Overall, NAGA's mobile platform is well crafted and thought with simplicity for new traders.
NAGA's web trading platform is the full featured one where the core activities can be performed, let's take a deeper look into it:
The home section is where the main feed is displayed. It's made of posts by NAGA, popular traders or traders that you follow.
Using the left menu you'll be able to access pretty much every feature of the platform.
When clicking on an asset, you'll land on the internal view that offers you access to the trading charts, the feed (where discussions take place) and the asset placement window. Having TradingView charts is definitely a nice touch as they are the industry standard of the highest quality.
The order placement panel is an exact replica of the one in their mobile app so the most important thing to keep in mind is that everything operates in either Investment amount (total value in currency) or specific rates (prices).
The portfolio section is called "MyTrades" and can be found on the top menu of the app. At the time of writing this review and creating these images, their platform appeared to have an issue these this icons but hopefully you'll find them operational now.
The portfolio section will give you a simple and efficient look into your active, pending and closed trades.
The news section can be found inside the Market Buzz tab (not an efficient way to place it in our opinion).
Market Buzz will be explained further in our review as it belongs to research and analysis tools but the important thing to know is that when clicking on the NewsDesk tab, you'll be able to see news from various sources which is definitely a great touch.
Overall, NAGA's web platform is definitely packed with a lot of features catering to different types of traders.
CopyTrading on NAGA's platform is a well crafted experience. Let's go over a few important points to keep in mind.
Whenever you click the profile of any user you'll be able to see more detailed information about them. Pay close attention to the Feed, Stats and Trades tabs located on the right side of the profile picture.
The "Stats" tab will give you access to very important statistics about each trader. The first one will be the profit chart as seen below:
Right after, you'll get access to other interesting stastistics such as the Profits and losses of the trader's trades and the best return of investment on each trade.
Right after you'll be able to see more statistics such as the most frequently traded assets and the average profit per trade.
While all the above stats are "interesting" we don't find them that useful as they fail to disclose completely the real performance of a trader.
In our opinion, it is as if we're trying to highlight with green numbers all the best possible achievements of each trader while not mentioning what goes wrong.
The last tab in the user profile called "Trades" is the most important one of them all (in our opinion). Here's why:
A few of the top traders at NAGA's platform have trading history on a daily basis but despite them having in some cases over 1,000 traders copying them, the average trade profit and loss is around $10 to $20 and the volume of the trade is of $1,000.
The issue with this is that even the top traders seem to be only small traders getting copied by a lot of people.
The real question here is, is this reliable? What about losses? Total account balances? Those are questions left to be answered by NAGA and the majority of copy trading platforms.
When exploring all the available traders at NAGA we found the following (which was quite distressing to be honest):
If there are no bugs or issues in the platform the above chart means the following:
See where we're getting here?
When analysing a few of his trades, we see profits and losses ranging from $1 to $50 on average (at least from what we're available to see) excluding the top stats.
This means that if someone with a big account comes and copies this trades, that person is risking his fortune on the knowledge of a $50 per profit trader that may lose more for his followers than what he can generate in the end.
The reason for this is that statistically, an investor can copy a "profitable" trader at the right time and make a profit or by bad luck on the wrong time and make a loss. While the trader will still seem "profitable" the investor on the other hand can be at a massive loss.
When looking at other traders we also found more distressing information such as:
In conclusion, we believe the incentive here is to open as many trades as possible, small ones and hopefully in profits with the hopes of gaining a "profitable" status regardless of the real consequences behind this.
NAGA offers a few beginner-level research and analysis tools, let's take a look at the first one: Market Buzz.
It's a visual representation that shows the amount of mentions that a particular asset had along with some extra settings to change the behaviour of the bubbles.
In simple words, it's a map that shows how much people are talking about something with some indicators of the positive or negative impact to be potentially experienced by an asset.
The other tool offered are signals by Trading Central, here's how they look:
While it's a nice touch to offer research and analysis tools like the ones above, it's
NAGA's educational tools are quite nice and entertaining while being conveniently placed on their platform. Currently, they offer:
When compared to the majority of brokers, NAGA definitely has a great positive point by knowing where to conveniently place their educational tools to make them easily accessible for all users.
NAGA is quite an interesting player in the financial services industry. Their offering seems as if it was crafted for an audience that expects simplicity yet their product is quite complicated and filled with excessive choices to make at every turn.
We can definitely congratulate NAGA on their platform design, their innovative ideas and the fact that they allow their users to purchase real stocks (depending on availability). On the negative side, there are too many difficult points that are worth considering in case you're planning to open an account with NAGA:
NAGA is definitely doing a great job by entering the major leagues in the financial services arena by offering real equities, copy trading and banking services. On the positive side we find their product offering to be a full suite of tools for all types of traders. On the negative side, we believe that if you're trying to build a copy trading platform, you should keep simplicity in mind and here's why:
Here's who we think can be best served by NAGA:
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