Trade Irish stocks for little more than €2

Online pan-European securities broker Degiro is launching in Ireland, promising to "liberate" Irish retail investors from high trading charges.

The Dutch broker says Irish investors will save as much as 90 per cent by opting to trade through its new platform. The broker charges a fee of €2+0.04 per cent for trades on the Irish Stock Exchange, €4+0.04 per cent for the UK; and €0.50+$0.004 per share in the US.

Buying €1,000 of Bank of Ireland shares will cost just €2.40 for example, compared with an average price of €26.40; a call option on the Eurostoxx 50 will cost €0.80 compared with average of €6; and €10,000 on US stocks such as Google will cost €0.59, compared with an average of €68.

Other fees also apply. A surcharge of € 10.00 + 0.10 per cent per order for example applies to email and telephone orders, while shorting stock costs from 1 per cent.

"The commission charges in Ireland are excessively high in comparison to the rest of Europe. This, coupled with a government stamp duty of 1 per cent on purchases of Irish shares, has made trading in Ireland a very difficult and exclusive environment," said Degiro director Gijs Nagel, adding that the company looks forward to "liberating Irish investors from the hidden costs that have plagued them for so long."

Ireland is the seventeenth country in which Degiro has launched its online trading platform since it was established in The Netherlands in 2008 as a trading platform for professional investors.The broker is hoping to build a 25 per cent market share in its first three years, and it offers trading in a wide range of products varying from stocks, bonds, ETFs, futures, options and CFDs.

Degiro is fully regulated by Autoriteit Financiële Markten (AFM) and De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). It processes € 30bn worth of transactions per year and is forecasting € 3bn in assets under administration at the end of this year.