International Online Brokers

I’m looking to start trading with an online broker. I’m situated in South Africa- I hear some of the brokers require you to be a U.S. resident (TD Ameritrade). I see interactive brokers is quite popular, however, they require a minimum of $10,000. I only want to start with $500. Any suggestions?

What broker do most South African people use? In any case, you probably want to raise a bit more money before starting this account. With $500, one trade will consume like 1% of your principal in commission…

There are a variety of local trading platforms in South Africa. I am looking for trade offshore (Should have been more specific). I like the setup of IB, but obviously the $10k minimum is quite high. Would you suggest starting with $1,000 instead? Or still to low?

Vanguard nigga. With your assets you need to do commission free ETFs.

IBKR is the best, and you don’t have to be a US resident/citizen.

Not to be a condescending BSDer, but I consider $10K sort of the minimum to start an investment account. If I only had $5K I would just keep it in checking until it hit $15K, then start an IB account, and keep a $5K buffer in cash. If I only had $500, well there are more pressing problems!

my minimum trade used to be about 5k, i have recently bumped to about 10k. rthe average trade i think is 8k per trade. and i never invested in an individual stock until my net worth was like 100k.

i would not open an ibkr account unless i had 100k. helps you avoid the 20 dollar monthly service fee. inkr has the lowest fees, but its more complicated to use. the outlay is pretty shittty. my favorite platform was optionshouse (cheap) and td ameritrade (expensive).

^ Yeah, I guess I would agree with that.

I was with Scotttrade back when I was under $100K, man did that ever suck (but cheap). But IBKR TWS is totally rad, if I had $10K I would probably go with them even with the fees, just to learn/monitor global markets. But that’s me.