[0:00]Today I'm going to show you how to use Trading 212 in 2026. There have been some significant changes to the service over the last 12 months. Some great, some I don't love if I'm being honest.
[0:10]So we're going to go through everything a beginner or an experienced user needs to know. Stuff like which account to use. I'll show you how to claim your free fractional share. I'll also show you how to buy and sell your first investment, how to get money off the platform.
[0:21]We'll go through most of the other features on the app as well, and I'll show you loads of tips, tricks, just little hacks to get the most out of the service.
[0:28]I have time stamped below absolutely everything, so it's easy to navigate, so you can just jump to the parts that are relevant to you if you're looking for an answer to a specific question.
[0:35]To get started, download the app using the link in the description if you want, or there's a QR code on screen. And by using that link, if you deposit a pound onto the app, you get a free fractional share worth up to £100.
[0:46]Now, this is an affiliate link. And all that really means is that I get a kick back if you use it, but it doesn't affect the cost of the service in any way, shape or form to you.
[0:54]I'm going to assume that people know how to get set up in terms of the easy part, like putting in their personal details and email verification.
[1:00]But let's just touch on the bits of the setup people get caught out by or often do incorrectly.
[1:04]First up, which account type. So once you've downloaded the app and selected a country of residence, you'll see this screen that asks you to pick an account type.
[1:11]Let's just go through these. So Invest is a general investment account that offers all of the investment features that 212 has to offer, including the ability to hold multiple currencies.
[1:21]For anyone outside of the UK, they'll likely use this account as their primary investment account.
[1:26]The CFD account involves very complex instruments in the form of derivatives trading, where most people lose money.
[1:32]This is the part of the business where 212 makes their money, and this really facilitates the app being pretty cheap everywhere else.
[1:39]My personal view is that this is closer to gambling than it is investing, so I just skip it altogether.
[1:44]And because I'm from the UK and I selected the UK as my country of residence, I have the ISA options available here.
[1:50]The stocks and shares ISA is an investment account, just like the general investment account really, but instead it protects your investment returns from taxation in the UK.
[1:58]And the cash ISA is essentially a tax-free savings account, which I'll cover later on in this video.
[2:03]I personally wouldn't use a general investment account until I'm maxed out my allowance on my stocks and shares ISA because of the tax efficient benefits it will give me long term.
[2:10]For someone in the EU looking at this, they're not going to have these account options. I'm going to use the stocks and shares ISA, so that's the one that I'll select, but the usability and functionality from this point on is almost identical.
[2:21]On these notification options here, do as you like with these, but in a moment, I'll show you how to turn off some of the more annoying ones really easily.
[2:27]Then it's all these verifications and ID checks. I did the email verification thing and for some reason it spat me out here and I was a bit like, okay, now what?
[2:35]I then clicked on the home button to continue up here. I'm not sure why it doesn't just continue automatically and I had to go searching for it in this way.
[2:43]There are then questions about yourself, your personal financial position as well as what are called suitability questions.
[2:50]These can feel a little bit invasive and patronizing, but it's a regulatory requirement.
[2:55]So brokers in the UK have something called KYC requirements, or know your customer requirements, anti-money laundering AML specific.
[3:03]That means they need to know who you are and your financial position. And then the suitability questions will ask you things like, what is your understanding of risk, and how might it affect you if your investments declined in value if you lost some money?
[3:12]Because remember, when investing, the value of your investments can go up as well as down, and your capital is at risk. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.
[3:20]I can't show you how to answer these questions. What I would say is genuinely answer them, give them a read, because if you just skip through and just try and blast any answers in, two and two might turn around and say, sorry, we won't allow you to invest because of how you answered these questions.
[3:32]Once you accept the Ts and Cs, your account is then set up. But it isn't. Honestly, two and two are just edging us the whole way through this process about being set up.
[3:40]You have to complete ID checks first after you've run around the house looking for your ID.
[3:45]This next thing is really important, the W8 Ben form. So essentially the US charges a withholding tax of 30% on dividends paid from companies based in the US to people who live abroad.
[3:56]But some countries have an agreement with the US to reduce that. We have one in the UK. It reduces that tax from 30% to 15% if you sign this form.
[4:04]So if you're a country that has an agreement with the USA, sign the form.
[4:11]We're going to start by putting some money on the platform. So click these three lines here. This is the menu that contains most of the settings functionality. I'll show you this in more detail in a bit.
[4:20]But I'm going to stick 200 pounds on, but you can start with as little as a quid.
[4:24]If you press deposit funds, you get a menu like this, where you're given different methods to deposit onto the app.
[4:28]I always use the instant bank transfer, as it's instant, and it's free up to an unlimited amount.
[4:34]The other options either take time or they have a £2,000 total limit before they start applying a fee of 0.7%. You don't need to pay that fee.
[4:43]It's annoying that Apple Pay and the other card methods incur this fee as they're the ways that you can set up recurring automated payments, but I would rather avoid that fee all together and just manually add money to the platform when I want to, or set up a standing order, you can set up a standing order.
[4:56]If you select the bank option, you'll then connect a bank account to this account and be bounced around between your bank and the app until the money lands instantly.
[5:04]At this point, you should be awarded your free fractional share. But if you've deposited funds and you haven't had a notification, well, then just click on the three lines again, scroll down to where it says promo code and insert code Damien, that's D A M I E N.
[5:20]Your balance now should appear on the home screen icon.
[5:23]Let me just show you the functionality of this screen while we're here. So this drop down menu allows you to switch between the different two and two account types.
[5:30]The bell icon here is the notifications tab, and it's where you can turn off all those notifications you don't want that I mentioned before. If you press the cog option here, you can just select what you do and don't want to receive.
[5:41]Back on the home screen, we have a list here and a pull-up menu. This pull-up menu feature is brand new to trade in 212's app.
[5:48]I actually had to re-shoot some of this video because they changed the app mid-production. They've had significant push back to it at the time of recording it also.
[5:55]The portfolio tab, which we'll cover in a moment, has been the focus of a lot of that criticism.
[5:59]I don't mind the pull-up tab thing, really. I am confused as to why they removed the Y-axis off this chart though. What's the point in a chart if you don't know the measurements?
[6:06]They're now also saying they'll roll back some of these changes. So you might have this style view of the portfolio tab when you watch instead of this one.
[6:14]212 constantly change the look and feel of their app, but the functionality, the core behind the scenes got to it remains the same.
[6:21]So if and when you're watching this, some things look slightly different, everything will still be in similar places. So this menu here is called a watch list. You can select which investments you want to follow here, but it comes pre-populated like this.
[6:32]What I've noticed here that's new is that these first three options are actually CFD products, which I think is an interesting choice from 212 considering you can't own a CFD inside of a stocks and shares ISA.
[6:42]If you click these, you're sent to the CFD arm of the app. Before you ever traded CFDs, you're going to need to deposit money on that side and fill out a load of risk questionnaires and suitability stuff.
[6:53]But yeah, it's an interesting decision to place them here. It's clearly advertising that side of the brand through the ISA, and I do think that these are more speculative, they're gambling in my opinion, most people do lose their money.
[7:04]I would personally delete these from my watch list. You can do that by scrolling all the way to the end, pressing on this pencil icon here.
[7:11]Select the list you want to edit and then just bin them off. It cleans it up and you can customize these later on as you see fit.
[7:17]There are other tables along here or categories. I really don't take them too seriously to be honest. If you click on say a random one in top winners, VYNE Therapeutics, you can see they've hardly been winning recently.
[7:27]In the middle here of the home screen, you'll notice a transfer portfolio button. So this is if you want to move money from another broker or account onto Trading 212.
[7:35]If you click on your cash balance here as well, you're given this screen to quickly deposit through. And this thing is interesting about interest here.
[7:42]So if you click on that, it gives you the ability to generate interest from cash being held inside of the stocks and shares ISA. This is the rate at the time of recording it. It's due to change and it will change again in the future.
[7:54]Now, the important thing is if you click enable, you'll see all of these Ts and Cs that have been shown to you.
[8:00]And what Trading 212 are saying to you here is, we might hold the fund inside of QMMFs, qualifying money market funds.
[8:06]These are considered pretty safe, but they are an investment product, which means your cash is not protected by the financial services compensation scheme in the same way it would be if it was inside of a cash ISA, say.
[8:16]I think the risk is low. I have this feature enabled myself, but I do think it's worth pointing out.
[8:20]It's also worth pointing out that 212 has flexible stocks and shares and cash ISAs, so you can switch money between the two whenever you like without using up your ISA allowance for that year.
[8:29]Now, the government has said that they're going to look to limit the ability to transfer from cash ISAs into stocks and shares ISAs because of their rules that they're introducing where they're going to reduce the cash ISA limit. So that might change that functionality. We're just going to have to wait and see what happens.
[8:44]Okay, I'll now show you how to buy your first investment. I'll demonstrate an individual company and a fund.
[8:48]The other tabs along the bottom, which we will cover in more detail, are the pie chart looking tab, which is your portfolio.
[8:53]The magnifying glass is what we're going to look at next, and this is where you find investments. And the person looking one is the social side of the app, where you can engage with other users.
[9:02]It's also where they have their pie feature, which is investment portfolios created by others that you can track.
[9:07]There's a whole section on how to create your own pie and looking at some of the ones put together by professionals. These social pies are not put together by professionals. They tend to be just other trading 212 users.
[9:16]I personally don't track any of them because I would rather do my investments myself, but if you want to, you can.
[9:22]Okay, we're interested in the magnifying glass for now. Pretty simple set up here. You can search for investments that you want at the top.
[9:28]All of these menus here are pre-populated and you can filter through them as you want. And right at the bottom of this page is one of the more useful filters I think, where you can browse all, so you can look at all of the stocks and shares, and you can look at all of the ETFs or exchange traded funds.
[9:43]If you're looking for that more passive index style investment and you don't know where to start, by going into here, you can see everything that's available.
[9:49]I'm going to buy Nvidia and a global index fund, not because I recommend them, but because they're popular. And I'm also going to buy another investment, a British one, so I can show you some of the functionality and some of the screens that you're going to see with different types of investments, so you're not surprised by any of the taxes or fees that you might incur.
[10:04]If I search in video into the search bar here, this is the actual investment. If you press buy, it'll send you straight to the screen to buy it.
[10:12]But if we just come back for a second, I just want to point out that again, below here is a CFD option.
[10:17]I typed in a few different searches up here for different asset classes and index providers and CFDs came up in a few places.
[10:23]Again, there's a lot of layers to get to before accidentally buying the CFD, but just to be clear, you cannot buy a CFD inside of a stocks and shares ISA.
[10:31]So if you're in the stocks and shares ISA and you suddenly find yourself looking like you're going to buy a CFD, just stop and make sure that is what you actually want to do.
[10:38]Okay, so if I click on the gray area to expand out Nvidia here, you get this standard screen across all investments pretty much.
[10:45]You can filter through the chart over different periods and you can customize the chart style by pressing on the cog here or expand it out even further by pressing on the arrows.
[10:53]The AI analysis can be interesting, I guess, but I'm not really at the point where I'm trusting AI to pick stocks for me yet.
[10:58]The social bit here is what other users are saying about the company, and related pies are other users' public pies that include this particular investment.
[11:07]Below upcoming events are snapshots of stats and financials. If you click on either of these, you'll get loads more information as well.
[11:15]If I just switch over to a fund instead. So you can see the menu is pretty much the same, but instead at the bottom, they have these different performance data sets as well as this fund allocation menu, which I really like.
[11:24]If you click on this, you can see the view of the top 10 holdings, also by sector and by country. And if you press see all again, you're going to see all of the holdings.
[11:34]It's also worth noting that for any investment, if you press the three dots in the top corner, this is where you can add the investment to your watch list.
[11:40]The instrument details button will give you more info, and for funds in particular, this is where you can access the key information documents.
[11:48]When you press buy, this is the screen you're going to get. It's pre-populated to a market order, which is the standard order type, which means it executes at the next best available price.
[11:57]There are other order types along here as well that let you set specific prices that you might want to invest at or, you know, I want to buy at this price or I want to sell at that price.
[12:04]Me and my team at financial interest made a full video on this that I'll link below for you if you want to go into these different order types. I mainly always just use a market order.
[12:13]Okay, so back with Nvidia, this slider allows you to set how much you want to buy. It's currently set to number of shares, but I prefer to switch it here to value, so I can enter a pound amount and use the keypad here to input that pound amount, as I just think it's much easier.
[12:27]24/5 trading will allow you to purchase investments outside of their markets being open. There is more information on that here.
[12:33]But if you choose to go down that route, please expect that you will not get the best price for the stock. Since during these sessions spreads between buy and sell prices of the stock are often wider.
[12:44]There is less liquidity, fewer people trying to buy and sell during these times, so I just don't enable this feature.
[12:50]Once you press buy, you get a full breakdown of the order to review.
[12:53]On screen are three different orders, one for Nvidia, an American listed business, a global index fund listed in pounds, and an AstraZeneca a UK-based company.
[13:03]As you can see, there are differences in the three order previews. All three display the order type, the share value and the number of shares that you will be getting, and also the commission that 212 take, which is nothing on all investments.
[13:13]That's it then for the fund. That's all there is there. No FX fees as I've purchased a fund listed in pounds.
[13:19]If you're seeing an FX fee like you do on Nvidia here, this is because you're buying an investment that's not listed in your domestic currency.
[13:26]The FX fee is 0.15%, and this is market leading, but you're going to incur that FX rate if you buy international investments inside of a stocks and shares ISA because you can only hold pounds inside of a stocks and shares ISA.
[13:37]But on the Invest side of the app, you can hold up to 13 currencies. So if by some sort of chance or circumstance you're the type of person with multiple currency bank accounts, you could deposit onto the app with say dollars or whatever currency to avoid those fees.
[13:50]I would obviously, if you're looking to do that, question what rate of conversion you get with your bank and check is that cheaper than 212. Don't convert with your bank at a higher rate to save a rate here. Just check the rates.
[14:02]Right, if we just go back to the breakdown then, so as I said, the FX fee is listed here. On AstraZeneca, you'll see something different, stamp duty.
[14:08]This is a rather silly tax in my opinion, applied by the UK government on the purchase of companies listed here. It's 0.5%. It's not a fee from 212. It's a tax paid to the UK government.
[14:19]So press buy and that should execute almost instantly, assuming the market is open.
[14:22]If we come over to the pie chart tab now, this is your portfolio. You can customize what's shown here by pressing the cog in the top right and clicking on reorder sections and move stuff around.
[14:32]The bell is the exact same notifications as the home tab that we spoke about before.
[14:35]You can get that AI analysis again on your actual portfolio, which can be fun, and I do think it throws up some interesting insights sometimes.
[14:42]Replaceable funds is to do with that flexible ISA functionality. So if you've taken money out, you can put it back in within the same tax year and it won't affect these ISA allowances here.
[14:50]Below is this new graphic that shows the breakdown of your portfolio. My three boxes are exactly the same size as I've only purchased three investments and they were all for the same amount.
[15:00]If you press see all, it will expand your portfolio, or instead of scrolling down to do that, you can just pull up this tab here to see your portfolio.
[15:08]While we're here, if you want to sell an investment, it's just like buying. Click the investment, press sell, and then this is a familiar screen, I hope.
[15:15]So that's purchasing your own manual investments. Now let's talk about pies. And a pie is essentially a portfolio of investments that you group together.
[15:23]So when you invest in the pie, it spread your money across those assets inside of the pie according to the specifications set by you or whoever created the pie.
[15:31]On the swipe up portfolio tab here, you see the option to create a pie. Model pies are pies created by professional asset managers such as Vanguard.
[15:40]They invest in a broad range of funds from that provider. And if you select one, you can then select different risk profiles at the top, and it will just dial up and down the combination of stocks and bonds within that pie.
[15:51]Social pies are again the ones created by other users on the platform, but I want to dive into custom and create your own pie.
[15:57]So you can add up to 50 investments into a single pie, and I'm just going to pick three funds here just for demonstration purposes, not because I think you should invest in them.
[16:06]You go click add to pie, you then go back and you click add to pie until you have everything that you want. You can then dial up or down the allocation of each investment in terms of how much of the pie you want that investment to be.
[16:18]Whenever you see this little circle here, it needs to total 100 before you're going to be able to proceed. And notice the minimum investment here is just over 3 pounds.
[16:24]It's not £1, it's because you're buying multiple investments at once.
[16:28]On the next screen are two different ways to invest. So if I select auto invest, this sets up a recurring payment.
[16:32]First of all, it'll show me a projected return if I buy these investments. And the way this is calculated is by using the five-year average annual return of the holdings in the pie. Past performance is no indication of future performance, so really don't see this and take it as gospel.
[16:48]It changes as I adjust the sliders and you can set the initial deposit here, and by clicking on this, it allows you to set what day, date and how many times in a month you wish to invest, and below that for how many years.
[16:59]This distribution tab here is basically saying when I put money in the pie, do I want that to rebalance the pie using self-balancing?
[17:05]So if some investments have grown and some have not, two and two will invest less in the ones that have grown and more into the ones that haven't to bring the investment pie back to the original parameters or percentages that you set at the start.
[17:17]By target means the funds are invested just how you set out here, regardless of how the investments are doing. You then name the pie, and if you click here, you can change the icon if you want.
[17:26]On the auto invest screen, you then get this breakdown. And then it's going to ask you to fund the pie.
[17:31]Only the card options here at the bottom could take money each month automatically. But these are also the options that charge you after you exceed that £2,000 limit.
[17:39]So I would avoid these all together, and I would use this option of free funds. But if you use that option, you need to always ensure that you have money on the platform for the day that your pie invests.
[17:48]You can either do that manually, or you can set up a standing order. So to get the standing order details, click the three lines menu in the bottom right here.
[17:54]Go deposit funds, click the arrow to get all of the options and press bank transfer takes two days.
[18:01]You then need to add a bank account, and then you'll get the details for the standing order specific to you. I've blanked mine out because yours will be unique to you, and I don't want you to accidentally send me some money.
[18:10]Back on the auto invest pie, you just confirm everything from there. Investing manually is a bit more straightforward. You just select the amount, and it needs to be above the minimum.
[18:18]Name the pie and assuming you have free funds, there it goes. The bar at the top here processes as the investments buy.
[18:25]The pie now appears in your portfolio here. And if you click on it, this page will give you most of the details as it grows over time. And Holdings is the particular investments inside of that pie.
[18:35]Now these investments are pretty much locked into that pie, and I want to show you how to get money out and to add and remove investments over time if you want.
[18:42]One way you can do that, press withdraw. So I'm now taking money out, and I can select again the same options around self-balancing and stuff as I did before.
[18:50]But if I press custom, I can then pick an individual investment and the amount that I want to take from it. Remember, this must equal 100 here.
[18:58]Or if I press the three dots in the corner here, I can export investments completely, removing them from the pie.
[19:20]Getting these sliders to hit 100 can be really annoying with my heavy hands.
[19:26]Because of that chopping and changing, my pie is now at balance. So the percentages are out of whack or out of line with what I set them to.
[19:32]212 will rebalance it for me if I press this button, and they will show me what they're selling and what they're buying.
[19:37]But just remember, when you're buying and selling, even with rebalancing, you can incur fees and taxes and other costs. So don't just rebalance all of the time because it might cost you a lot of money.
[19:45]The final menu to cover is the three lines. I'll go over some bits that we haven't already discussed.
[19:49]Get a reward is your own personal invite code to send to friends to get a free fractional share for you both.
[19:53]Manage funds is where you can move money between the different sides of the 212 app, but it's also where you can deposit and withdraw funds if you like. So withdrawing funds.
[20:00]You use the slider and you pick an account that you've already used to deposit through. The withdrawal limit here is nothing to really worry about.
[20:07]It's more limited to the amount of available cash that you have. So I've been moving cash around the platform on and off, making deposits while making this tutorial, and some of it's invested.
[20:16]So the limit really is the cash that you have sat on the platform ready to go in cash. It takes three business days, or that's what it advertised, but most of the time when you request it, it's instantaneously.
[20:29]You can see the status of any requests that you've made here. History gives a breakdown of all the things like your transactions and your dividend history, and you can download reports here.
[20:38]But for more detailed reporting such as statements, click on documents right here. And then settings is all of your personal details, and within my account, under account details is the close account option.
[20:47]Contact us is the main way to speak to 212. It's your standard chatbot assistant that will send you to a real person if you ask it nicely.
[20:54]The cash ISA part of the app is really simple, as it's just a tax-wrap savings account, basically. The home screen shows the balance.
[21:00]The ISA allowance bit calculates across the app. It doesn't consider ISAs elsewhere. And then there's a big transfer button. The Piggy bank shows all of the details of what you've earned and the current rate.
[21:10]But this rate is as of the time of recording this and may have changed since then. The daily interest calculation is based on your current balance. The interest isn't actually paid daily though, it's paid monthly.
[21:20]Below is the banks that your money has been held with. As it's in a cash ISA, there will be no QMMFs here, unlike with the stocks and shares ISA, if you enable that feature.
[21:28]So any money here is protected under the financial services compensation scheme up to the current limit. And then there's another big transfer button here.
[21:35]Right, the invest side of the app is almost identical in functionality to the stocks and shares ISA, but there are a couple of differences, and I'm just going to point those out for you.
[21:42]As I said, it's multi-currency, up to 13 different currencies. And when you look at an investment screen, at the bottom, you'll also see this option here around lending.
[21:50]So this is share lending, and it gives you the option to earn potential interest by lending your shares to someone, typically a short seller. Basically, you get paid to lend your shares to someone who thinks that the value of your stock is going to go down.
[22:02]You can't do this in an ISA as no share lending is allowed, so this option does not appear there. If you enable it and then click on most borrowed, you can see more details here.
[22:09]The final additional feature is a pretty big one, it's the card tab here. So you can get either a physical or a virtual card that you can use and spend any of the balance that you have held as cash inside of the Invest side of the app.
[22:20]The card is advertised as having no fees and no FX fees either when spending money abroad in any of the 13 currencies that you can hold on the app.
[22:27]They also promote the fact that you get cash back and the rate is up to 10%, but this is with selected retailers and you can see those here.
[22:34]The standard rate is actually 0.5% on all purchases. Sometimes I've seen promotional rates of 1.5% depending on the time of year, but the amount of cash back that you can receive anyway is typically capped at £15 a month.
[22:46]Now, that does change as well quite often, so it depends on when you're watching this.
[22:50]You can also through the card invest spare change or cash back that you receive or both. You enable this feature, pick where you want the money to go and then you can also set a multiplier to increase the amount and set a monthly limit a maximum that you would like to invest.
[23:02]Please note that those investments will exist on the invest side of the app, not inside of an ISA, so they're subject to capital gains and dividends tax potentially.
[23:10]Right, I think that's it pretty much, but if you want more detailed content about 212 and other brokers, my team runs a channel called Financial Interest that covers this kind of stuff throughout the year, more of this kind of content.
[23:20]We also have a comparison tool that ranks brokers based on specific accounts. The channel is here and I'll link everything below for you that you need in the description and in the pin comment. Thank you so much for your time today. I'll see you soon.
