Reviews

XTB Broker Review 2023 - The Good and the Bad

By Stefano Treviso, Updated on: Apr 07 2023.

XTB in a Nutshell

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XTB in 60 Seconds

• Professional platform with customisable layouts
• Over 2,131 instruments from which 1,877 are stock CFDs
• Competitive forex and stocks spreads

XTB is an international broker specialised in CFD trading and low cost forex spreads.

XTB Full Review

• Is XTB safe?
• XTB Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal
• XTB Trading Fees
• XTB available assets
• XTB Mobile Trading Platform
• XTB Web Trading Platform
• XTB Research and Analysis Tools
• XTB Educational Tools
• Verdict

Is XTB safe?

XTB is safe and well regulated by several governmental entities, let's go over a few of their top licenses with a direct link to the license provider, that way you can be sure that you're looking at the right information:

• CMNV: Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (Spain’s Financial Regulator). XTB holds license #40.
• KNF: Polish Financial Supervision Authority (Poland’s Financial Regulator). To view XTB’s registry with KNF, click here
• CySec: Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission. XTB Holds license # 169/12.
• FCA: Financial Conduct Authority (United Kingdom’s Financial Regulator). XTB holds license FRN 522157
• IFSC: International Financial Services Commission (Belize’s Financial Regulator). XTB holds license # 000302/185

Bottom line, being a well regulated and supervised broker founded in 2002 and a publicly traded company in WSE, we conclude that XTB is a trustworthy financial services provider.

XTB Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal

XTB does not have a minimum deposit or withdrawal requirement. It is up to each client to determine how much they want to trade with. Below you'll find a list of their available payment methods:

• Visa
• Mastercard
• Bank Transfer
• Sofort
• Neteller
• Paypal
• Skrill

Base Currencies

XTB allows the following base currencies:

• United States Dollar
• Great British Pound
• Polish Zloty
• Hungarian Forint
• Euro

XTB Trading Fees

XTB charges the following fees:

• Spread: the difference between buy and sell prices
• Commissions: specifically 0.08% with a minimum of $8 on stocks and ETFs
• Swaps: the overnight fee which is the cost associated to holding leveraged positions
• Inactivity fee: $10 a month after 1 year of inactivity (not using your account)

Spreads

Here's how their spreads compare to similar brokers:

Commissions

Here's how XTB's commission compare to similar brokers:

XTB available assets

Here's how XTB's available assets compare to similar brokers:

When it comes to stocks, XTB is definitely competitive. On the other hand, they definitely need to keep improving their instrument offering.

XTB Mobile Trading Platform

XTB’s mobile platform is well built, smooth, fast and visually appealing. All assets have assigned an icon to them which makes it visually attractive and the right options are available within 1 click.

There are no groundbreaking or innovative features on XTB’s mobile platform, just a well built mobile companion for your trading experience.

Mobile Home

Right at your platform’s home, you’ll be able to search for assets using the magnifying glass at the top right corner or edit and create watchlists by clicking on the gear icon at the top right corner as well.

A notification centre is nowhere to be found, still, in most cases brokers use the notification centre to deliver useless information so it’s better to not have one at all than to have one with pushes written by an underpaid writer recommending buys or sells.

Asset View

XTB’s mobile platform asset view is definitely a great experience as they decided to squeeze everything you need in a single place.

Interesting points:

• You’ll have the ability to check your asset’s market depth
• If you scroll down you’ll have key data, price alerts and news

There is a market sentiment indicator but we all know very well that they’re completely useless.

The beauty of the asset view is that you can open a trade right away without needing to access any other window and if you toggle the Take Profit or Stop Loss switches, you’ll be able to define your orders right there.

Order Placement

As mentioned before, you can open a trade straight from the asset view.

An interesting point is that XTB functions using Volume as their quantitative measure to open all sorts of trades, please be very cautious with this, here’s why:

• If you’re opening a trade on AAPL shares of Volume 1.00 it means you’re trading 1 apple share.
• If you’re opening a trade on Gold of Volume 1.00 it means you’re trading the standard contract size of 100 ounces of Gold (which is a lot).

To save yourself from opening the wrong trade, always click the “Show Details” button and you’ll be able to see the “Contract Value” indicator which amounts to the total size of your trade.

After clicking on Buy or Sell, a small pop-up will appear to confirm your transaction.

Portfolio

XTB offers a standard portfolio view that allows you see:

• Open Positions
• Pending Orders
• Closed Positions
• Cash operations

The last one is for fees, commissions, deposits, etc. 

News

XTB offers financial news of their own, nothing to be impressed about. Just a couple analyses and features to read.

As mentioned before, XTB is a very powerful choice for Forex Traders, and clearly they seem to know it as you can find a direct tab in the bottom of the app to access their Economic Calendar.

Charting Tools

Rotating your mobile device horizontally will allow you to enter the full screen charting tools.

What we can say about them is that they’re fast, responsive and smooth. XTB’s mobile app is clearly a custom developed native app.

Other brokers have these laggy applications where you can really feel that you’re using some sort of “web browser” experience where the app is simply loading web content and formatting into your device, clearly, this is not the case. 

XTB Web Trading Platform

XTB’s web trading platform is quite an impressive tool for specific uses such as scanning stocks using their screener and creating custom multi-chart views.

Web Home

Welcome to XTB’s web platform home, here’s what you’ve got available on the default layout:

• Left side: Market Watch (allows you to search for assets, view watchlists and open trades directly from each asset)
• Right side: Multiple Blocks (News, calendar, market analysis, history and chart views)
• Bottom: Portfolio Section (Open positions, closed positions, pending orders, cash operations and your balance)

Everything in XTB’s platform is configurable. Notice on the below image, every section of the platform has a “+”  and an “x” icon at the top right side. This allows you to create tabs with different tools according to your needs.

Notifications

Clicking on the bell at the top right side opens the notifications centre. A nice feature is that you’ll be able to filter them according to the type of notification.

Clicking on the bell located at the top right side of your platform will open price alerts. Here you’ll be able to manage your existing ones, edit them or create new ones.

Asset View

Whenever you click on the small “Info” icon on each asset, a popup will appear showing you detailed information about your asset.

The information that XTB provides is very interesting and worth observing as for example it’s very detailed performance metrics when it comes to stocks.

Order Placement

When trying to place an order you’ll be prompted with a popup and here you’ll gain a detailed view of the specific parameters of your order. 

Definitely one of the best views out there as it allows you to see clearly what spread, commissions or swaps you’re paying before even opening your trade.

Portfolio

The portfolio is an exact representation of the one found in the mobile app, not much to comment about it except that we’re very appreciative of the emergency button they created:

It allows you to quickly close segments of positions in case of emergency. It’s very useful if you have 50 trades open at the same time.

News

One of the variable tabs at the right side will unveil XTB’s financial news (written by themselves). Not much to comment on this point except that we would definitely prefer a Reuters feed.

Charting Tools

XTB’s web platform provides a valuable charting experience, especially for frequent traders as you’ll be able to configure different charting views using the views selector.

Thanks to this option you can have a particular view with 4 commodities and another view with 4 currencies.

Being able to define custom views will allow you to trade more efficiently and study asset correlations.

XTB's web platform is definitely well crafted, customisable and user friendly.

XTB Research and Analysis Tools

We’ve reached the most valuable tool inside XTB’s platform, their Stock screener. 

Here you’ll be able to search for companies and filter them using many metrics, for example:

• Profits to earnings ratio
• Dividen Yield
• Earnings per Share
• BETA
• Market Capitalisation
• Etc

It’s definitely a nice feature for savvy traders that are looking to go into the fundamentals of the stocks they trade.

XTB also provides a heatmap for Forex, US stocks and EU Stocks.

XTB Educational Tools

XTB provides the following educational tools:

• Market Analysis
• Educational Articles
• Webinars

Their offering definitely needs extra tools to compete with similar brokers.

Verdict

XTB’s main benefits are offering low forex spreads accompanied by comprehensive research and analysis tools such as their own custom stock screener. On the negative side they charge a commission of 0.08% (minimum $8) on stock and etfs.

XTB is well suited for professional high volume traders that are looking to exploit the benefits of their real market spreads (found in stocks and ETFs) and use their stock screener to detect good trading opportunities using a broad range of metrics.

This broker is definitely designed for experienced traders with a clear understanding of the markets they want to trade. Their platform is not beginner friendly at all. Beginner traders could be easily confused by XTB’s “Volume” measure used to define quantities when opening positions.

If you’re a trader that operates under a low budget and you’re interested in shares, XTB is not the best choice for you as you’ll find them very expensive (with their 0.08% or minimum 8$ stocks and ETFs commission).

If you’re a high volume trader you’ll definitely find the advantage of taking the best out of their low forex, stocks and ETFs trades.

Good luck!