Giordano Salvatori, founder of STA · 24/10/2026 · 6 min read
Yes. Buying and selling financial instruments is a lawful activity for any adult, and no title, license or registration is needed to do it with your own money. You do not need to open a VAT number, at least as long as you do it as a private person, that is, without organizing the activity as a job with clients.
The law looks elsewhere. It checks whoever offers you the platform, because anyone who puts people in touch with the markets and holds or moves their money must have an authorization. And it looks at you only for tax: gains must be declared. The overall picture, from the beginning, is in the guide to mindful online trading.
In Italy there are two main supervisors. Consob oversees transparency and the fairness of conduct, the Bank of Italy the soundness of intermediaries. The lists of who is authorized are public on their websites. In Europe there is also ESMA, the authority that coordinates common rules and keeps its own registers.
Many European brokers work in Italy with the authorization of their home country, which is valid across the Union. In that case you find the name in the register of that country's authority. For cryptocurrencies, the European MiCA regulation has applied since 2024, requiring an authorization from anyone offering crypto services, and the transitional periods that allowed operating under national rules ended by mid 2026.
How to run the check, step by step, is explained in how to recognize a serious trading platform.
Not trading itself, but unauthorized activity. Offering investment services without authorization is a crime, and Consob has the power to black out the websites of those who do it: in recent years hundreds have been blocked. The problem is that a blacked out site reappears with a slightly different address, so you cannot count on the block to defend you.
For you, as a private person, the real risk is not a penalty. It is giving money to someone no one oversees and never getting it back. If a platform is not in the registers, you have few ways to turn to an authority. That is also why the warning signs are always the same: unsolicited contact, rush, assured returns, money to send to a person.
There is another boundary to know. If one day you started trading on behalf of others, with their money, that is a regulated activity and it cannot be done without authorization, not even for free among friends.
Some rules are there to protect you. Since 2018 ESMA has set limits on leverage for retail clients on CFDs, the contracts for difference. The caps differ by instrument, and go down to 2 to 1 for cryptocurrencies. For the same clients there is the automatic closing of positions when the margin falls to half, and negative balance protection, which stops you from losing more than you have in the account.
Anyone who passes certain thresholds of experience and wealth can ask to be treated as a professional client and give up these protections. For someone starting out it is not a good idea. How leverage works and how much it can make you lose in a short time is the reason those limits exist.
Here the answer depends on what you trade and where you hold the account, which is why the last word belongs to an accountant. In general terms, for shares, ETFs, CFDs and the like, gains are miscellaneous financial income and are paid through a substitute tax of 26%. Losses can be offset against gains of the same kind and carried forward over the following four years. For government bonds the rate is lower.
Cryptocurrencies have their own rules, and they changed recently. From 2025 the old exemption threshold of 2,000 euros is gone, and the rate on capital gains rose to 33% from 2026. These are rules the legislator often tweaks, so check the version in force on the website of the Italian Revenue Agency.
The practical point is the type of intermediary. An Italian broker can act as withholding agent, meaning it calculates and pays the taxes for you. With a foreign intermediary you usually declare the results yourself in your tax return, and in some cases list the account in form RW, the one for the tax monitoring of assets held abroad. Forgetting an item costs more than any fee.
A piece of advice worth a manual: keep a file with every trade, the date, the amount and the result. When it is time to declare, it saves you hours of work and spares you mistakes.
Using a program, a bot or an artificial intelligence system to decide your trades is lawful, just as using a spreadsheet is. The same rules as before apply, though. Whoever offers you the service must explain clearly what it does and what it does not, nobody can guarantee results, and anyone who receives money from you to "manage" it needs an authorization. In the guide on automated trading you find what an automated system can and cannot do.
No, and this is the part most often misunderstood. An authorized intermediary gives you transparency, controls and an authority to turn to if something goes wrong in the relationship with it. It does not protect you from the market. In Europe CFD brokers must disclose the share of their retail accounts that lose money, and the published percentages are generally between 60% and 90%. We talk about it in the article on whether you really make money with online trading.
Legality is the floor, not the guarantee. Before putting in real money, the right step is to practice: you can see how in free demo trading account.
STA offers trading cards for crypto and US stocks on OKX, built by ten artificial intelligence agents with a debate between Bull and Bear. The funds stay in your OKX account, you do not send them to us, and every card has its stop. The history is public: the hashes of the cards are on GitHub, timestamped every day with OpenTimestamps, so anyone can check them.
The DEMO is free forever, with real prices and the same cards as REAL, and you need an account. In the launch phase, which began on 16 October 2026, STA's fees are temporarily disabled, even in REAL; the ordinary price list, suspended while the launch lasts, is 18% of the positive net result of each day, with no offsetting of losses. Tax obligations remain yours, as with any account, and for exact figures a professional is worth it.
Every card as soon as it closes, with the result and what STA learned from it. It's free and you don't need to sign up.
Follow the channelA DEMO account with virtual capital and real prices, the same cards as REAL users.
Try DEMO for free →This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Trading crypto-assets involves a high risk, including the total loss of the capital used. Numerical examples are for illustration.
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