In this post, I will be going through the brokerages/apps that I am using from day-to-day basis that aid in my investing/trading journey.
As I’ve shared that I started my journey in early 2018, and was also anxious on which platform should I take. My consideration was whether the platform can be reliable, efficiency, and easy to use. For most consideration, one can choose between a bank-backed and a normal online brokerage.
Bank-Backed
As the name goes, it is backed by a bank which mean that it is relatively safe as banks usually have a credit rating pegged to them, and in Singapore most banks that you see are having at least A credit rating. These brokerages are usually a subsidiary of our widely known local banks; DBS, OCBC, and UOB. Bank-backed brokers are usually less competitive, with most of them having similar fees structure and not as competitive as online brokerages. Usually people go along with these because of convenience, and if they are Treasures or high frequency trader, you get a better deal, else it is really expensive if you trade very small positions. Their IU/APP/API are usually less user-friendly and for example DBS Vickers struggle with large volume from what I hear from people, where its server tend to crash.
DBS Vickers
I use DBS Vickers when I started off mainly for convenience as I can still hold the money in my account, and it also satisfied my step-up requirement for higher interest back in the days. The fee structure is as below;
I still maintain my DBS Vickers account for my SGD Investment Book as transaction with DBS for local shares, it will be credited into your CDP which is deem much safer as you hold your stocks directly. Easily seeing from this, to make minimum commission (I reckon you are a small position trader like me, so ignoring the >50KSGD bracket), you’ll need to initial a position of at least SGD8,929 which puts your commission at SGD25.0012. Common sense, the less you invest, the more it will cost you. However, for recent times, there are cash up-front payments which means you must have the cash before you deal in that transaction, and this is really cheap at SGD10/trade before CDP/SGX fees. This puts the commission at 0.112% on the same value of SGD8,929 which is way less than half making it affordable. However, you’ll still be subjected to same commission when selling.
Online Brokerages
These are definitely the more favorable platform that Day Traders (or wannabes) use and these usually have much more competitive pricing along with better API/APP etc. However, you need to directly transfer fund onto these platforms, and these might have a small lag time so transfer ahead of your planned trades/investment. These can go as cheap as 5 free trades a month, or 1USD per trade for USD. Some examples that I’ve heard people use frequency are; FundSuperMart, Saxo Markets, TD Amertitrade, and Tiger Brokers
Tiger Brokers
While there’re many reviews on Tiger Brokers out there already, I’ll save my effort as you can easily read up on them by googling (as much as I try to help and share, this is not a review blog, nor I am sponsored by Tiger to write about them). This is probably one of the easiest online brokerage for Singaporean, your account gets approved within minutes if you use SingPass to sign up and for topping up, you can set up DDA with DBS bank (only DBS now) which enable your fund to be in your account within minutes as well! Aside from the low commissions, the top-up and withdrawal fees are free-of-charge! You can use my referral code if you’re keen to join Tiger Broker (Disclaimer, you get similar bonus signing up without any referral code as well). https://www.tigersecurities.com/accounts?invite=XFI1OW
Wrap-up Thoughts
My goal of the blog is to reach out to public audience, so I try to be as brief and as simple as possible. Hopefully this can help everyone get started. On another note, please do your homework before you engage in anything; just lost over 40USD over long/short trades on Tiger Broker.
I’m trying to cover all most basic stuff before going into some regular investing/trading tips that I use, if possible do leave comments on what you might be keen to hear about.
No comments:
Post a Comment