What trading accounts should I open when I turn 18?

Hi there! So I will be turning 18 at the end of 2020, and I figured it would be in my best interest to allow the power of compounding to work for me at this age. I have a decent knowledge of stocks and the stock market, and I am tempted to open a DBS Vickers Account rather than a RSS. However the fees are kind of a barrier, at $25 a trade, commission/other fees excluded. I would like to know what is the minimum amount of money one should invest using DBS Vickers to make the investment worthwhile

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Elijah Lee

04 Jul 2020

Senior Financial Services Manager at Phillip Securities (Jurong East)

Hi anon,

You'll want to start by opening a CDP account online first with your Singpass.

https://investors.sgx.com/cdp-account-opening/#...

Once your CDP account is open, you can open a couple of brokerage accounts with 2-3 firms and try them all out. There are no limits to how many brokerage accounts you can have, as long as you can keep track of them. Sometimes it might be useful to have a backup account with another brokerage, as you never know when you might face a outage of service from one broker. (This has happened before).

If you're looking at S$25/trade and a 0.28% minimum, then you'll usually need around $9000/trade to make it worthwhile.

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Tan Wei Ming

03 Jul 2020

Founder and Writer at Frugal Youth Invests

For SG market, I will recommend opening DBS Vickers for its Cash Upfront account and FSMOne account for selling from CDP.

DBS Vickers Cash Upfront which is only available using IBanking has cheaper commission of $10 and stocks are kept in CDP. With FSMOne account you can sell stocks from CDP at about $10 which would have been $25 if using other brokerage accounts.

For overseas market, I would recommend Interactive Brokers as it has one of the lowest commission. Take note of the minimum account maintenance fee of $3 per month until you turn 25. Apparently, I heard that this fee has been waived for the time being.

I should also recommend you in opening a Tiger Brokers account. Seedly has written a review about it. Though it is a new broker and is from China, I feel that they are still run properly. You do not need to worry about your funds being misused etc. Custodian for Tiger Brokers is DBS (Funds), CIMB (local stocks) and Interactive Brokers (US).

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