Could you guys share what platform do you guys use to trade? Be it locally or overseas. And why do you prefer the platform?

TD Ameritrade U.S. branch, because of the very low (0.00 USD) fees. Regularly only U.S. equity tradable. Will soon - if approved by regulation - be merged into Charles Schwab.

Swissquote. Many different equities tradable, relatively high trading fees and quarterly account maintenance fee capped to max 200 Swiss Francs per year. Relatively high currency conversion fees and trading fees with different tiers for other countries or certain mutual funds. Nice and very competent customer Service telephone&email.wissquote recently received Singapore bank approval to extend into Asia, should sometime open up broker business there(?).

POEMS: nice platforms, trading fees o.k. with cash prepaid account, I dislike the quarterly account management fees (but they are relatively low and open to waiver with some trades over the quarter)

... generally the Singapore broker fees are already low, this not anymore so super-important criterium for broker choice.

I can imagine that FSMOne would also be a first rated broker for Singapore retail investors.

Consors Germany and Onvista Germany: very good fee structure, good service. But probably not possible to open accounts as Singapore resident.

Sweden: Avanza, excellent fee structure, restrictions: absolutely required to have a checking account with a different bank, which is extremely difficult for nonresidents.

Saxo and IB them are often mentioned as cheap ones, no experience on my side.​​​

Answers from the panel!

Sudhan (Seedly): For SG shares, I use DBS Vickers. When I started investing, there were very few brokers and DBS Vickers was one of the more prominent ones. It was introduced to me by my uncle and I signed up for it. For US shares, I use FSMOne because they have low commissions in Singapore. I also own shares in iFAST, so in a sense, I'm helping the company that I own shares in, so that's how I see it.

Ser Jing (The Good Investors): Personally, I use UOB Kay Hian because when I first started investing about 10 years ago, my parents already had an account and they had a friend who was a broker there so we kept the relationship going. For my professional activities, I am using Interactive Brokers because its cheap, has good execution capabilities and gives me access to wide variety of markets.

Stanley (Value Invest Asia): I started out with Phillip Capital because my friend became a remisier, so I supported him and started an account with him. I also use FSMOne and a few US brokers like ThinkorSwim and Interactive Brokers. Most of them are pretty similar but the US brokers might be much lower in cost.

For more discussions on SeedlyTV S2E05, you could check out the video and Q&A here! ​​​