Status: Researched · 13 June 2026. I have not opened a Lightyear account.
What it is
Lightyear is the Estonian entry in Europe’s neo-broker wave — built in Tallinn by Wise alumni, regulated by the Estonian FSA (with a separate FCA entity for the UK), and open to residents across the EU/EEA and UK. Where Trading 212 and Revolut compete on price for the same developed shelf, Lightyear’s market list has a distinctly Baltic personality.
What it reaches
17 country markets, all online: the US, UK and Canada; the developed European core (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland); and the three lines that earn it a place here — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, plus Hungary and Poland. Two shelves on the markets page are not country markets: “China” is US-listed Chinese ADRs, and “Europe” is an aggregate.
The Baltic line is the point. The Baltic exchanges are thinly served — IBKR covers them via its Baltic permission bundle, and the Nordic brokers sit behind personnummer/BankID walls — so a consumer app that any EU or UK resident can open, with Nasdaq Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius on the shelf, is the practical route for most Europeans. Fitting that it took a Tallinn-built broker to put its home region on an app. Budapest and Warsaw are nearly as unusual for this category.
Use it / skip it
Use it if you’re an EU/UK resident who wants the Baltics, Budapest or Warsaw without a phone desk, a local account, or IBKR’s interface — or as a clean, cheap core app with personality beyond the standard shelf. And cheap means cheap: US orders cost 0.1% capped at $1, UK orders £1, euro-denominated orders €1, ETFs trade free of execution and custody fees, there’s no account fee, and FX runs at the interbank rate plus 0.35% — a price list that undercuts the Nordic incumbents comfortably. Skip it as a frontier vehicle — beyond Warsaw and Budapest there’s nothing emerging or frontier, and US persons aren’t onboarded at all.
Verdict
The most interesting market list in the European app category: where every competitor offers the same developed shelf, Lightyear added its home region and Central Europe. For Baltic stocks specifically, this is the access story for ordinary European retail. Researched, not tested.
Sources
Public sources checked (June 2026):
- Lightyear markets page (country tiles, screenshot embedded) and exchange list: https://lightyear.com/en/stocks
- Lightyear legal/regulatory pages (Lightyear Europe AS, Tallinn; FCA UK entity)
