Every retail trading account opened outside the United States starts with a quiet decision the customer almost never sees: which currency the account will be denominated in. For most European, Asian and Latin American customers, the answer is US dollars. Stocks are priced in dollars. Crypto is priced in dollars. Most CFDs are priced in dollars. The platform happily lets you fund in your local currency and quietly converts it on the way in.
The conversion is not free. It is rarely the worst fee on the platform, but it is one of the most consistent. The good news for customers is that the actual cost is published. The disclosures live on the broker’s own pricing pages, and a careful reader can work out, before opening an account, exactly what each round trip will cost.
What the brokers themselves disclose
Take eToro, the largest copy-trading broker in Europe and the example we will use for the rest of this article because its disclosures are unusually clear. eToro operates with USD as its base currency and publishes its conversion fees in two places: the conversion fee table and the firm’s EU Client Terms and Conditions.
According to those documents, the conversion fees applied to a typical European retail customer break down like this:
| Step | Charge | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit in EUR by debit card or bank transfer (account funded as USD) | 150 pips of the spot rate | eToro fees page |
| Trade conversion (local-currency account into a USD-denominated asset) | 0.75% per conversion | eToro fees page |
| Withdrawal in EUR (USD balance converted back) | Conversion fee per the same table | eToro EU T&C, September 2025 |
A "pip" in this context is one ten-thousandth of the spot rate. At the EUR/USD rate published as the European Central Bank reference of 1.0843 on 28 February 2025 (the most recent month-end rate available from the ECB statistical data warehouse at the time of writing), 150 pips corresponds to roughly 1.4 percent of the deposit amount. The 0.75 percent trade conversion is on top of that, applied each time you move money between the local-currency wallet and a USD asset.
For a customer funding €1,000, opening a position in a USD stock, and withdrawing the position back to euros, the total conversion drag from those three steps stacks to roughly 2 to 3 percent of the principal, before any commission or spread. Those numbers come from eToro’s own pricing page; we are not estimating them.
How this compares to a non-broker FX provider
For context, Wise, a regulated payments and multi-currency account provider, publishes its FX fee on its public pricing page and applies it to the mid-market rate. The fee starts from 0.57 percent and is shown to the customer before the transaction is confirmed. Wise also publicly states that no spread is added to the mid-market rate; the entire compensation is in the visible fee.
The economic point is not that Wise is a broker (it is not), but that an EUR/USD conversion done by a regulated multi-currency provider charges roughly half a percent on the way through. The 1.4 percent that a CFD broker keeps on the same conversion is the broker’s margin on top of what the underlying FX leg costs to execute. This margin is legal, disclosed, and a normal part of how retail brokers earn revenue. It is not, however, a number that the marketing material tends to lead with.
How much this matters depends on how often you move money
For a customer who deposits once, leaves the money invested for five years, and withdraws once, an FX margin of 1 to 2 percent on each leg is small in the context of long-term returns. It is a one-time tax on the principal, which the market will recover for you in a few good months.
For a customer who tops up monthly and withdraws quarterly, the same percentages compound. Doing the maths for a customer who deposits €500 every month for a year and withdraws once at year-end, the conversion charges stack to a low-single-digit percentage of the annual deposit. That is a meaningful number on top of trading commissions, and it does not appear in the trade history because it is netted out of the FX rate at execution.
For a customer who funds in euros, trades EUR-denominated CFDs, and withdraws in euros, the FX charge still applies, because the account itself is held in dollars under the hood. This is the case that most surprises customers when we explain it to them.
Three ways to reduce the cost without changing broker
- Fund less often, in larger amounts. The conversion fee is proportional, so frequency is what compounds the drag. A monthly €500 deposit incurs the conversion four times more often than a quarterly €1,500 deposit, even though the totals match.
- Hold a USD account at a multi-currency provider, fund the broker from the USD account. Wise, Revolut and several other providers offer USD-denominated accounts to European residents. Convert your euros to dollars at the multi-currency provider’s rate (closer to the mid-market), then send dollars to the broker, which avoids the broker’s conversion margin entirely.
- If the broker supports it, switch the account currency to your local currency. Some brokers offer this; eToro lists EUR, GBP, AUD and DKK among the local-currency account options on its conversion page. Customers using these accounts pay no conversion fee on deposits and withdrawals in the same currency, but the trade-time 0.75 percent conversion still applies whenever they buy a USD-denominated asset.
Why "0% commission" is incomplete without this number
The phrase "zero commission" is now closely watched by EU and UK regulators. Brokers regulated under MiFID II are required to publish a costs and charges disclosure that includes spreads, financing, and conversion fees. The disclosures exist; they are usually a multi-page PDF linked from the footer and rarely surfaced in the marketing.
The single most useful thing a customer can do before opening an account is open the broker’s costs and charges PDF, search the document for the word "conversion," and read the paragraph that follows. If the answer is anywhere above one percent per leg, factor that into the comparison with whichever broker you are weighing it against. The headline trade fee is rarely the largest cost on the platform. It almost never is.