Which Broker?

Which Broker Guide

I currently use 4 brokers:

• Interactive Brokers: For my Foreign Stocks/ETFs 
• Standard Chartered: For my local stocks / Foreign ETFs
• FSMOne: For my HKSE stocks/ETF / CPF unit trusts
• Poems - for CPF/SRS (July 2020: FSMOne can now handle CPF/SRS)

Its good to have more than one broker-custodian. Institutional Diversification (Definition from the book Permanent Portfolio):

• Institutional diversification simply means dividing money among several funds, brokerages, banks, and other institutions to diversify against risks from the people and organizations holding and managing assets. Institutional diversification is not difficult to accomplish and most investors are probably at least halfway already. The most basic approach to institutional diversification is to simply have accounts with at least two brokerages or mutual fund companies and split funds between them more or less evenly. The idea behind institutional diversification is to simply split money among more than one bank, brokerage, or fund provider. This can protect against threats including fraud, incompetence, identity theft, natural disasters, cyber‐attack, terrorism, or other future unknown calamities

Forex spreads of various brokers (updated for 2020)

• Interactive Brokers - 0.01%
• Standard Chartered - 0.40%
• FSMOne - 0.25%

Brokerage Rates 

• Standard Chartered Priority Banking 0.20%, no minimum
• FSMOne 0.08%  HK$50 minimum (I believe its HK$5 minimum for RSP). For SGX its S$10 for any size trade (yes, including $1m trade - but SGX also charges clearing fee so you have to pay that too)
• Interactive brokers - different rates for different exchanges, LSE you are looking at US$1.97 minimum for roughly US$2-3k purchase of LSE ETF.

July 2020 Update: FSMOne can now handle CPF/SRS stock trades

I am currently using Poems for CPF/SRS stock trades and there is a min $28 comm. This is the same price charged by all the other traditional brokers. FSMOne has just announced that they are now able to handle CPF/SRS stock trades at 0.08% $10 minimum commission. That is fantastic. Do note that the custodian for CPF/SRS remains unchanged. FSMOne is just the broker.

July 2020 Update: Interactive Brokers