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New UK discount broker and Prague trading from Saxo Bank

There have been a couple of updates to broker details on the site. In the UK discount stock brokers table, I have added a new service from Clubfinance, previously known as a fund supermarket and the cheapest way for self-directed investors to access the Skandia platform.

This is quite an unconventional service in terms of fees. It charges an account fee of 0.35% per year, with a minimum of £25 per quarter, but online trades in UK shares are priced at just £0.5/trade. Quite a few UK brokers are likely to adjust their fee structure in the run-up to RDR and the platform review, so we can expect to see some others experimenting with unusual arrangements like this.

In the international dealing area, Saxo Bank has added the Prague Stock Exchange for cash equity trading. It’s always encouraging to see a major broker adding another awkward-to-access market, but in practice the significance of this one is limited – there are just  15 stocks listed on the Prague exchange and many of them are cross-listed in Vienna.

The Czech Republic also has an over-the-counter market, RM-SYSTEM Czech Stock Exchange, but that isn’t part of Saxo’s new service. Foreign investors interested in that could look to Fio Banka, which owns RM-SYSTEM and offers an online trading service.

Categories
Updates

Eastern Europe online stock trading with Brokerjet

Brokerjet, an online stock broker operated by Austria’s Erste Bank, is now in the broker directory. The firm could be very useful to investors buying shares in Eastern Europe, since it’s the first multimarket online broker to offer a good range of stock markets there that provides services in English.

The available stock markets in Eastern Europe are Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. Given that most of these are expensive and hard to access through foreign brokers, Brokerjet’s fees [PDF] look reasonably good at around €20-35 minimum, although Saxo Bank is cheaper for Poland.

The service also includes most Western European markets. International investors will probably have access to most of these through other stock brokers already, but the inclusion of the German regional markets could be helpful for some. These are not included in many international stock brokers’ coverage, since they are of limited interest to most investors.