For a EUR-denominated UCITS ETF listed on Tradegate, Lightyear Europe AS charges €0 commission per trade (fund manager fees apply). DEGIRO’s Core Selection covers the same Tradegate-listed ETFs at €0.00 commission plus a €1.00 handling fee, for €1.00 all-in — DEGIRO’s own published wording for this is “€1 per transaction”. Currency or external product and spread costs may apply. Over 12 monthly ETF trades a year, that’s a €12 gap on this specific trade type. DEGIRO’s AutoFX rate (0.25%) is lower than Lightyear Europe’s FX rate (0.35%), but for EUR-denominated ETFs on Tradegate no FX applies on either side. Which broker works out cheaper overall depends on the specific ETFs, exchanges and currencies used — the fee tables above break down both.

Yes. Lightyear supports fractional investing on stocks and ETFs — EU stocks and ETFs became fractional in July 2025. The minimum order is €2 / £2 / $2, and the fractional share is structured as co-ownership of the underlying security, not a CFD or other derivative wrapper. Only market orders can be used for fractional buys and sells. DEGIRO’s helpdesk states it facilitates whole shares only, so the minimum there is one full unit. One trade-off worth knowing: fractional positions on Lightyear cannot be transferred to another broker — they have to be sold, or topped up to a whole share, first.

Both are regulated EU investment firms with client assets held separately from their own. DEGIRO is a bank — flatexDEGIRO Bank SE — primarily supervised by BaFin, with its Dutch Branch registered with DNB and supervised by AFM and DNB. That banking licence brings a German Deposit Guarantee Scheme covering uninvested cash up to €100,000, and a German investor compensation scheme covering 90% of losses on investments that cannot be returned, capped at €20,000. Both schemes cover broker failure only, not investment losses. Lightyear Europe AS is an investment firm, not a bank, regulated by the Estonian Financial Supervision Authority, with investor protection up to €20,000 via the Estonian Investor Protection Sectoral Fund — again, broker-failure cover only, and uninvested EUR cash itself is not covered by any deposit guarantee scheme. On investment protection, both cap out at €20,000, though the German scheme pays 90% of the loss up to that cap while the Estonian fund pays up to the full amount. The material difference is DEGIRO’s banking licence and the €100,000 cash guarantee that comes with it.

Lightyear has built-in auto-invest: Repeat Orders (daily, weekly or monthly) for single-instrument automation, and Plans (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) to allocate across multiple instruments. Plans auto-invest works only on fractional instruments — a non-fractional holding added to a Plan is grouped under “Auto investing unavailable” and has to be bought separately, and money market funds cannot be added to a Plan at all. Repeat Orders are funded from your Lightyear cash balance or by standing order, are placed as market orders, and are skipped silently if there is not enough money at the scheduled time. DEGIRO’s order execution policy lists eight order types and two validity durations, none of them scheduled or recurring, so each purchase is placed individually.

Lightyear’s fractional shares mean every euro of a fixed monthly contribution gets deployed, and Plans remove the manual step of logging in each month, though Plans auto-invest works only on fractional instruments. Lightyear also offers Savings, an optional money market fund product whose yield is variable, set by the fund rather than by Lightyear, and shown live in the app — but capital is at risk and it is not available in Belgium. DEGIRO is accessible at the platform level, but every order, including recurring ETF purchases, has to be placed individually, since its order execution policy lists no scheduled or recurring order type. For a simple 1-2 fund UCITS ETF portfolio with monthly contributions, Lightyear removes more manual steps in 2026.