As many of you might know, Standard Chartered's online platform has ended their no minimum trading fees, and as of yesterday, will now be charging a minimum of $10 per trade (unless you're one of their priority banking customers).
As someone who has almost exclusively taken advantage of their low trading fees, this is a huge blow, and likely to change my investment strategies significantly.
The lack of a minimum trading fee meant that I was able to 'test drive' many of my stock choices at a very low price, as can be seen with my small pockets of holdings in ST Engineering, Singtel etc. This enabled me to take low risks, and I was able to get out of several bad trades with little losses. Conversely though, this meant that winning trades got me little profit as well, but at least it proves that I was on the right track.
Now though, given that the maximum fee I can tolerate is approximately 1%, all trades I make will have to be a minimum of $1,000, a not-so-small outlay considering the size of my current portfolio. End result would be of less activity in the market, since I would need time to save up the requisite amount, and also, investments using a Regular Savings Plan are now looking more attractive. I'm now seriously considering placing money with OCBC's blue chip investment plans, maybe $500 per month (since the minimum transaction fee is $5) into the STI ETF.
What do you guys think?
No comments:
Post a Comment