I just lost $32.15 USD from eToro for “buying” Bitcoins

TLDR: Trading Bitcoin via eToro is not a way to buy Bitcoin! You cannot transfer the Bitcoin you “bought” to your external wallet. Closing the trade will make eToro sell the Bitcoin you “bought” to the current market price. Closing it while Bitcoin market value is lower than when you sold it will incur loses!

Intro

So, I allocated couple of money to do research-and-development for Cryptocurrencies, Investing, etc. I decided that I need to procure Bitcoins first if I wanted to start playing with it.

Previously, I bought Bitcoins from Paxful. But the Bitcoin price nowadays is volatile, so I feel like the prices offered by the sellers there are higher. And I don’t have time to wait for these sellers to update their prices. So I tried to look for another option.

eToro

I stumbled upon an article that you can withdraw your Bitcoin from eToro to an external wallet. I logged on with my old account in eToro that I never use and checked the Bitcoin price. And lo and behold, the price of Bitcoin in eToro is real-time! This feels like it solved all my problems. I don’t have to transact with multiple sellers to buy Bitcoin and the price is exactly as to what is the market price.

I loaded up my old eToro account with $500, went to Bitcoin page and clicked the “Trade” button.

I placed an order for $500 for Bitcoin at less than 10% of the current price. I wasn’t online when I finally bought it but when I logged in on the morning before work, I saw that there are Bitcoins on my portfolio already. And since the Bitcoin price is up that morning it even says I’m up by 2%.

I decided that after work or in the evening I’ll transfer these Bitcoins to my wallet.

Transferring the Bitcoins to my wallet

So that night, I noticed that Bitcoin price was really down, slightly lower than how much I bought them, but it didn’t really matter to me. I’m only on eToro for science, research, and making the feel.

So I started transferring “my” Bitcoins now to my own wallet. According to the article https://www.etoro.com/en-us/customer-service/help/1320587972/how-do-i-transfer-cryptocurrency-from-the-etoro-trading-platform-to-my-etoro-money-crypto-wallet/ I need to install the eToro Money app. So that’s what I did.

And according to the article, there should be a link that says: “Transfer to Wallet” when you click your Bitcoin on your Portfolio:

Etoro article says there should be “Transfer to Wallet” link

But I cannot find it. After reading more on the article the part where it says:

eToro withdrawing Bitcoin to external wallet says that the Trade will be closed as part of the process

So that gave me an idea that, probably, they do not automatically close the Trade, and instead, you should manually close the trade and only then you will be able to transfer the Bitcoin to your wallet.

So, I went ahead and clicked the “Close Trade”. Then boom! I lost the Bitcoin and I saw the money back to my eToro account minus $32.15 USD!!!

So what happened is that after Closing Trade, eToro sold my Bitcoin at the current market price, which very unlucky for me is the times when Bitcoin price is down.

I lost $32.15 which is around 1,500 Php and it feels really bad. Not to mention, the money is stuck on eToro account and if I withdraw I just lose more money because of their withdrawal fees, conversions, etc.

Well, at least now I learned from this mistake. And hey, since I do not want to lose more money from withdrawal fees, maybe I can play around with eToro in the future as well.

Conclusion

Don’t do what I did. If you need Bitcoin close to its real-time price find something else. At the moment I am using Coins.ph if on occasional times when the prices in Paxful are not fair.