Technically, the process of buying a share in an ETF and buying a single stock within the Invest.MT5 account is exactly the same.

The difference between these two instruments is the extent of investors’ exposure to a particular market or sector of the economy. Whilst some companies are more successful than other direct competitors, the investor’s portfolio of a single company stock remains solely reliant on the performance of the management of this company.

At the same time, ETFs offer investors the possibility to diversify issuer risk related to stocks and to gain exposure to the entire sector of the economy, as if the investor was buying stocks of all the relevant companies of this sector.

Instead of making dozens and even hundreds of transactions in the stocks of relevant sector companies, an investor may choose to buy a share in the thematic ETF by executing a single transaction, thus saving on trading fees and gaining the desired exposure level.