Is eToro good for long term investing in 2025?

Is eToro good for long term investing?

eToro is a great general investment account for investing in the long term is you’re interested in buying major US stocks and copying the portfolios of other successful traders. Jeppe Kirk Bonde for instance, has historically produced market-beating returns for his 30,000 followers, and now has over $100m copying his portfolio (past performance is no indication of future results).

However, there are some things that I would say that eToro could do better at for long-term investing from the UK. There are many things that eToro is good at (like copy trading), but if you are a long-term investor there may be better options.

The main reasons why eToro is not good for longer-term investors are because their accounts are in USD, you can’t invest through tax-free wrappers, or into a pension and there is limited access to bonds and funds.

eToro also used to be good for long-term investors as they absorbed the stamp duty on UK shares. But now you have to pay the 0.5% UK stamp duty tax when investing in UK companies so the tax breaks are no longer there.

But as I will go on to explain if you are investing in the long term, here is why these are issues.

USD Account Balances

With eToro your account balance has to be in USD. This is part of how they make money (when they convert your GBP into USD) but it means that if you buy UK shares, then over time your profits can be eroded away by differences in the GBPUSD exchange rate.

Granted this can also work in your favour, but you’re not trading FX, you’re investing and if the exchange rate moves 5% and you have a £100,000 portfolio, that’s £5,000 lost.

No ISA or SIPP

With an ISA you can invest up to £20k a year and no pay tax on the profits. But, unfortunately eToro doesn’t have one. They do have co-branded eToro ISA in partnership with Moneyfarm. But Moneyfarm is more of a digital-wealth manager, so you may as well just open a separate account with Moneyfarm, it will at least help you resist the temptation to speculate with your long-term investments.

With a SIPP, you are investing for your pension and also don’t have to pay tax on your profits. But with eToro you cannot invest in an SIPP, so if you are buying shares and aim to hold them until you retire, your tax bill at the end of it could be unnecessarily high.

• Related guide: How to make money on eToro.

No funds, corporate bonds or small-caps

eToro is great at giving investors access to popular markets like US stocks, cryptocurrency and commodities, but their market access is actually pretty limited. You can’t invest in small-cap growth stocks in the UK for example.

Plus if you are building a long-term portfolio it should be diverse so you should add in some corporate bonds (fixed-income investments) and some funds that spread the risk and invest in lots of shares and bonds for you.

This is a shame really, because eToro generally does give people what they want. However, it would be great if they could focus a bit more on what people need.

However, eToro does let you invest in bonds through bond ETFs or fixed-income portfolios like YieldGrowth which contains a range of 13 bonds from Vanguard, iShares and SPDR.