Saxo Capital Markets has reduced its cost to trade international shares by one-third via its new multi-asset SaxoTraderGo platform, which will assist in greater global share exposure, particularly for SMSFs.
The trading platform, officially launched in Australia last Wednesday, is fully operational on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.
It will replace the preceding SaxoTrader platform going forward.
The development of SaxoTraderGo was informed by a survey of almost 3000 Saxo clients globally.
It found competitive pricing was an important factor for investors when it came to online trading.
“We improved our pricing significantly for foreign exchange towards the end of last year,” Saxo Capital Markets Asia-Pacific chief executive Adam Reynolds said at the Australian launch event in Sydney last Wednesday.
“And we’re improving our pricing in conjunction with the SaxoTraderGo launch here for some of the equity markets, for instance, with US equities we’re doing $9.90 per ticket for up to 990 shares and then 1 cent per share above that, which is very aggressive pricing.
“So I think we are well priced; we don’t have to be the cheapest because we’re not necessarily trying to appeal to the total mass market [as] we want to appeal to the sophisticated investors.
“We’re strongly confident that our pricing is good.”
SaxoTrader offered US share trades to Australian investors at $15.
The Investment Trends “Online investing in Australia June 2015 report” revealed SMSFs were the second most used vehicle for trading shares.
“What we’re seeing in the international share space is that demand went down a little bit around the global financial crisis because investors were scared and became conservative, but since 2012 the pendulum has actually started to swing the opposite direction,” Investment Trends analyst Irene Guiamatsia said.
“There’s a huge demand for international shares in this country, but we have not seen that translated yet in actual uptake of online shares and investing, rather we’ve seen a massive demand in exchange-traded funds.
“We suspect some of the reasons around that is perhaps not adequate pricing around international share offerings in general, so it’s going to be interesting how new offerings are changing or bridging the gap between the demand that is very much there and the uptake.”
The new platform also provided investment ideas and reports, which were embedded from Saxo’s social trading community, tradingfloor.com.
“Whilst we do give trade ideas, we don’t force them or try to bend the market, but if there are trade ideas, they have to be strong and cover everything – why we’re getting in, where you’re getting out and where the risk management level is,” Saxo Capital Markets Australia chief executive Anthony Griffin said.
SaxoTraderGo is linked to Class Super and Super IQ to allow trustee data to be transferred between the platforms.
Saxo Capital Markets is an Australian subsidiary of online trading and investment specialist bank Saxo Bank.
