I'm in Australia.  What should I look for in an online stock broker, for trading mostly on the ASX?
It depends what you want to do with them.  If you are just simply going to drip-feed into pre-identified shares or ETFs every few months at the market price, you don't need fancy features: just go with whoever is cheaper.   You can always open another account later if you need something more exotic. Some brokerages are associated with banks and that may give you a benefit if you already deal with that bank: faster transfers (anz-etrade), or zero brokerage (westpac brokerage on westpac structured products.) There's normally no account fee so you can shop around. If you want the cheapest online broker in Australia, you can't go past CMC Markets, they charge $9.90 upto a $10,000 trade and 0.1% above that. There is no ongoing fees unless you choose to have dynamic data (stock prices get updated automatically as they change). However, the dynamic data fee does get waived if you have about 10 or more trades per month. You don't really need the dynamic data unless you are a regular trader anyway. They also provide some good research tools and some basic charting. Your funds with them are kept segragated in a Bankwest Account, so are resonably safe. They don't provide the best interest on funds kept in the account, so it is best to just deposit the funds when you are looking to buy, and move your funds elswhere (earning higher interest) when selling. Hopes this helps, regards Victor. Update They have now increased their basic brokerage to a minimum of $11 per trade unless you are a frequent trader. I don't know where your trade figures are from. ETrade, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, etc all have trading costs under 10 USD per share, so I'm not sure where your costs are coming from. I doubt currency conversion or anything like that will double the cost. As for your question, the answer is: It depends How much trading will you do? In what types of investments? For example, Schwab charges no commission on ETF purchases, but this is not an advantage if you wont buy ETFs. Consider minimums. Different brokers have different minimum cash balance/deposit requirements, so make sure you can meet those. It's true that you can get real time quotes anywhere, but consider the other services. For example, TD Ameritrade pools research reports for many publicly traded companies which are nice to read about what analysts have to say. Different brokers given different research tools, so read about offerings and see what's most useful to you. You can open different brokerage accounts, but it's much more convenient to have a one-stop place where you can do all you trading. Pick a broker which is low cost and offers a variety of investments as well as good customer support and a straightforward system. "OptionsXpress is good. I have used them for many years to trade stocks mainly (writing Covered calls and trading volatility). You set the account up through OptionsXpress Australia, and then fund the account from one of your accounts in Australia (I just use my Bank of Queensland account). The currency conversion will be something to watch (AUD to USD). The rates are low, but one of the best features is ""virtual trading"". It allows you to give yourself virtual funds to practice. You can then experiment with stop-losses and all other features. Perhaps other platforms have this, but I am yet to see it... anyway, if you want to trade in US stocks you are going to need to switch to USD anyway. ASX never moves enough for my interests. Regards, SB"
Interactive Brokers offers many foreign markets (19 countries) for US based investors. You can trade all these local markets within one universal account which is very convenient in my view. IB offering "I don't think blanket answers are very helpful. You are asking the right question when you are young! You have a large number of investment options and Australia has the Superannuation system that you can extract significant tax value from. I've not attempted to grade these with regard to ""risk"", as different people will rate various things with different levels, depending on their experience and knowledge. Consider the following factors for you:-" API wise there's just one at the retail level: Interactive Brokers (India). Brokerage is high though - 3.5 bps for F&O and 5 bps for cash.  I've used Sharekhan (good, can get to 2 bps brokerage, trading client software, no API). Also used multiple other brokerages, and am advising a new one, Zerodha http://www.zerodha.com. API wise the brokers don't provide it easily to retail, though I've worked with direct access APIs at an institutional level. I think your best bet would be commission-free ETFs, which have no minimum and many have a share price under $100. Most online brokerages have these now, e.g. Vanguard, Fidelity, etc. Just have to watch out for any non-trading fees brokerages may charge with a low balance. From what you have written, it could be a boiler room company. These operate with fancy website and have proper book keeping systems but are elaborate scams. How did you find about this broker. If there was a seller when you purchased the shares, there is no reason you can't be seller I use and recommend barchart.com. Again you have to register but it's free. Although it's a US system it has a full listing of UK stocks and ETFs under International > London. The big advantage of barchart.com is that you can do advanced technical screening with Stochastics and RS, new highs and lows, moving averages etc. You're not stuck with just fundamentals, which in my opinion belong to a previous era. Even if you don't share that opinion you'd still find barchart.com useful for UK stocks. "I think I understand what you're trying to achieve. You just want to see how it ""feels"" to own a share, right? To go through the process of buying and holding, and eventually selling, be it at a loss or at a gain.  Frankly, my primary advice is: Just do it on paper! Just decide, for whatever reason, which stocks to buy, in what amount, subtract 1% for commissions (I'm intentionally staying on the higher side here), and keep track of the price changes daily.   Instead of doing it on mere paper, some brokers offer you a demo account where you can practice your paper trading in the same way you would use a live account. As far as I know, Interactive Brokers and Saxo Bank offer such demo accounts, go look around on their web pages.  The problem about doing it for real is that many of the better brokers, such as the two I mentioned, have relatively high minimum funding limits. You need to send a few thousand pounds to your brokerage account before you can even use it. Of course, you don't need to invest it all, but still, the cash has to be there.  Especially for some younger and inexperienced investors, this can seduce them to gambling most of their money away. Which is why I would not advise you to actually invest in this way. It will be expensive but if it's just for trying it on one share, use your local principal bank for the trade.  Hope this gets you started!" "TDAmeritrade, an online stock broker, provides banking services within their brokerage accounts. The service offers all of what you are looking for. HOWEVER, this service is only available for free with their ""Apex"" qualification.  Here is a tariff of their fees and services." Yes, http://shares.telegraph.co.uk/stockscreener/ has what you're looking for. Since I've been doing this since late 03 I have colo machines in Chicago and NYC, and have direct exchange data feeds etc.  I mentioned in a prior post though, for someone starting out on algorithmic trading, I'd recommend Nanex for tick data and Interactive Brokers for your brokerage account. IB has a robust and easy to use API. It won't let you do the most low latency stuff bc you can't colo at the exchange and have to clear through their order management systems but if you are looking at opportunities that exist in the market in excess of 50ms it's probably a good place to start. If not, go Lightspeed imo, but that'll cost you on the colo/data a lot more. It sounds like you are interested in investing in the stock market but you don't want to take too much risk. Investing in an Index EFT will provide some diversification and can be less risky than investing in individual stocks, however with potentially lower returns. If you want to invest your money, the first thing you should do is learn about managing your risk. You are still young and you should spend your time now to increase your education and knowledge. There are plenty of good books to start with, and you should prepare an investment plan which incorporates a risk management strategy. $1000 is a little low to start investing in the stock market, so whilst you are building your education and preparing your plan, you can continue building up more funds for when you are ready to start investing.  Place your funds in an high interest savings account for now, and whilst you are learning you can practice your strategies using virtual accounts. In fact the ASX has a share market game which is held  2 or 3 times per year. The ASX website also has some good learning materials for novices and they hold regular seminars. It is another good source for improving your education in the subject.  Remember, first get educated, then plan and practice, and then invest. I definitely want it, all of my cash that i've accumulated goes into my brokerage but I just wanted to check that in can be done.  I just wanted to see if anyone knew anyone personally or anything like that because most of the time it's people e-bragging or bullshitting to make them seem like something.  I also wanted to see if it is still feasible with all of the algo trading and stuff that has been dominating the market versus an individual trader.  Thanks for your reply though, I like the analogy a lot. My go-to response whenever anyone asks me this is the Monevator table of platform fees. It looks a little complicated at first, but scroll past the table for a couple of paragraphs of useful info to help narrow down your search. The general tone of the page is geared more towards investors in index funds, but the fees on share-dealing are right there in the table too. There are also special notes if there are discounts for frequent traders and that sort of thing, so not too much passive-investor elitism on show! I was wondering what relations are between brokerage companies and exchanges? Are brokers representing investors to trade on exchanges? Yes...but a broker may also buy and sell stocks for his own account. This is called broker-delaer firm. For individual investors, what are some cons and pros of trading on the exchanges directly versus indirectly via brokers? Doesn't the former save the investors any costs/expenses paid to the brokers? Yes, but to trade directly on an exchange, you need to register with them. That costs money and only a limited number of people can register I believe. Note that some (or all?) exchanges have their websites where I think trading can be done electronically, such as NASDAQ and BATS? Can almost all stocks be found and traded on almost every exchange? In other words, is it possible that a popular stock can only be found and traded on one exchange, but not found on the other exchange? If needed to be more specific, I am particularly interested in the U.S. case,and for example, Apple's stock. Yes, it is very much possible with smaller companies. Big companies are usually on multiple exchanges. What are your advices for choosing exchange and choosing brokerage companies? What exchanges and brokerage companies do you recommend? For brokerage companies, a beginner can go with discount broker. For sophisticated investors can opt for full service brokers. Usually your bank will have a brokerage firm. For exchanges, it depends...if you are in US, you should send to the US exchanges. IF you wish to send to other exchanges in other countries, you should check with the broker about that. "Traditional brokers There are tons of players in this market, especially in USA. You have traditional brokers, brokers tied to your bank and a bunch of startups. The easiest is probably a broker tied to your bank, because you probably don't have to wait to fund your brokerage account and can start trading immediately. Often the older/traditional brokers don't have very intuitive interfaces, it's the startups who do a better job at this. But honestly it doesn't really matter, because you can use reporting services that are different from the services you use to execute your trades. Meaning that you only use the interface of your broker to execute trades (buy or sell), and use third party services to monitor your holdings. Monitoring services: Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, Sigfig, Morningstar,... are services allowing you to monitor your holdings. But you can't execute trades with them. Start-ups: Then there are a bunch of startups that offer investment services besides the traditional brokers. Start-up > Robinhood The most ambitious one is Robinhood, which offers the same service as a traditional broker, but completely free (most of the traditional brokers charge a flat fee and/or percentage when buying/selling hodlings) and with an intuitive interface. They're mobile first, but announced they will be launching their service on the web soon. Start-up > Acorns Another popular, mobile-first start-up is Acorns. They offer a lazy-investing service which rounds your everyday purchases and uses the change to invest. It's great when investing is not on your mind, but you still want to invest without realizing it. Start-ups > Robo-advisors Robo-advisors auto-invest your money across a bunch of funds picked based on your risk profile. Because the robo-advisers are fairly new, they often have the most intuitive interfaces. These robo-advisors often don't allow you to pick individual holdings, so these services are best when you want to passively invest. Meaning you don't want to look at it very often, and let them do the investing for you. There are tons of robo-advisor start-ups: Betterment, Wealthfront, Personal Capital, Sigfig, FutureAdvisor,... Also bigger parties jumped on this trend with their offerings: Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, Ally Managed Portfolio, Vanguard Personal Advisor, etc. Summary: It's fun to pick individual stocks, but if you start out it can be overwhelming. Robinhood is probably the best start, they have reduced functionality, but gets you going with an attractive interface. But soon you'll realize it's extremely hard to beat the market. Meaning that hand-picking stocks statistically gives you a worse return than just buying into the general stock market (like S&P500). So you can decide to just buy one fund with a traditional broker that covers the general stock market. Or you can decide to try out one of the many robo-advisors. They haven't been around that long, so it's hard to tell how effective these are and whether they beat the market. If you're young, and you believe in start-ups (who often try to challenge the traditional players), try out one of the robo-advisors. If you want to play a bit and are addicted to your smartphone, try out Robinhood. If you are addicted to your phone, but don't want to check up on your investments all the time, go for Acorns. Of course you can combine all these. Lastly, there are tons of cryptocurrencies which might give you a large return. Tons of startups offer intuitive interfaces to trade cryptocurrencies like Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken. But beware, there is a lot of risk involved in trading cryptocurrencies, it's completely unregulated etc. But definitely check them out. Oh, and you can also invest by giving out loans through LendingClub, Prosper etc. Who can you trust? Above gives you an overview of your options intermingled with some reasoning. But regarding your question ""who can I trust"" in terms of advice, it's up to yourself. Most traditional broker services don't give you any advice at all, you're on your own. Robo-advisors don't give you advice either, but let their proprietary algorithm do the job. Are these reliable? Nobody can tell, they haven't been around long enough, and they need to go through a bear market (a crash) to see how they respond during rough times. Some robo-advisors offer you personal consultancy (I believe Sigfig and PersonalCapital) does this (limited to a few hours per year). But obviously they'll try to promote their robo-advisor services."