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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Stock exchange choices... yes please

I finally got myself to open CIMB's cross border trading account.

The platform to invest in HKSE, SGX, NYSE and NASDAQ is a good start as I am more inclined towards investing in H-shares for now. For those who don't know, a H-share is a term used on China stocks listed on HKSE.

My trading experience has been as such:

  • Ease of funds transfer - for those with maybank2u or cimbclicks access, use the FPX option as this is free and does not come with the usual daily limits. I would rate this process as confusing for now as there are too many windows opened in the process which increases the anxiety of "what happens if the connection dies". The other thing is pop ups need to be disabled because of the numerous windows to be opened. You would need to disable this feature again after logging off if that is your preference.
  • Trading - your trading limit is limited by the balance in your trust money x 3. However, there is also an overall trading limit to your account set by cimb, usually set to default at RM100,000. But the silly thing about this is even if your trust money balance x3 is more than RM100,000, your trading limit is still RM100,000. I managed to rectify this after a few calls to the traders to explain why this is not right and got the limit increased to RM200,000 for now.
  • Settlement - I have so far only used the settlement via trust money and that is easily enough done on the website. But one word of caution though is that even though you have traded via itrade.cimbinvest.com, the settlement is at CIMB's Malaysian brokerage which is at www.itradecimb.com.
  • Rights and other corporate action - I had a rights offer for one of my overseas stocks and the process for subscription is straight forward enough. However, in your portfolio you will not see these rights shares or entitlement appear unless you manually edit your portfolio. My question is what if you incorrectly entered the number of shares and over/under sold your shares. What do you do then?

At present CIMB's product seems to be the better of 2 (the other that I know of being the OSK product) online cross border trading platforms. But unless the user friendliness of that product is improved via fewer windows and seamless integration between itradecimb and cimbinvest, take up will be limited. Also, what about the other exchanges such as Thailand, Indonesia, India and Brazil?

1 comment:

Lish said...

What do you think of investing in gold?