Best Share Trading Platforms – Forbes Advisor Australia - Forbes

With so many share trading platforms available to investors, it's hard to know what you should look for as you compare them all. The above list helps take guesswork out of it for you, with the following factors being highly regarded as important considerations:

Minimum Investment

Before signing up to a share trading platform, ensure that you can afford–and are happy to–pay the minimum investment. Often this is $500, but it can increase to over $1,000 or decrease significantly to $0 for smaller more niche platforms.

Sometimes this minimum investment is only for the first initial trade, while other times, there's a minimum for every trade you make via the platform.

Some platforms may have introductory offers available to new customers that waive these minimum initial investments, or a certain amount of free trades depending on how their minimum investment conditions are set up.

Fees

There are numerous fees associated with share trading, regardless of how you choose to trade. When looking at a trading platform or online broker, you need to understand what fees you will face for having an account and when you made a trade.

The common fees to be aware of are account fees or subscription fees, brokerage fees, ETF trading fees, international trading fees, withdrawal fees, and currency conversion fees.

Live Pricing Capabilities

The ASX fluctuates throughout the day, with changes happening minute-by-minute. This is why knowing whether live-pricing is available via your chosen share trading platform is important, as you want to know where your investment stands in real time.

Some automatically offer live pricing to all users, while other platforms may charge a fee in order to access live-pricing feeds.

CHESS-sponsored ASX Trades

There's a lot of lingo when it comes to investing, and CHESS-sponsored trades is another one to add to your investment encyclopedia. Put simply, CHESS-sponsored trades means the ASX has a record of you owning the shares directly.

If your share trading platform operates with a CHESS-sponsored model, you'll be provided with a Holder Identification Number (HIN) if you don't already have one. If you do, you can transfer your HIN between brokers.

The HIN is then how the ASX recognises which shares you own. This then means that if the trading platform or online broker you are using happens to go under, your ownership of the shares will still be recognised.

Some brokers, however, choose to use a custodial model for the ASX (international shares are traded in this manner). Those that use a custodial model for buying and selling on the ASX often have cheaper fees, but they do not have the protection of guaranteeing your share ownership if something were to go wrong.

Therefore, it's important to understand what system a platform operates from, so that you know how your ownership of shares will be treated in the event something goes wrong.