How Do You Start Buying Stocks and ETFs in Singapore?

For anyone who’s interested in buying stocks or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), getting started can be super intimidating.

That’s because you have to figure out how to go out and buy (i.e. invest) in something that can grow your money over time.

Thankfully, in Singapore, we have a lot of options in terms of how we can do this.

First off, for like 95% of us, buying individual stocks isn’t going to be the default option.

That’s because not all of us have the time, or inclination, to really research companies in depth and buy them to hold.

Sure, you can always hold some stocks but the majority of our monthly investing should go towards baskets of stocks. 

That’s where the other option comes in for those of us in Singapore. 

We can just focus on investing in low-cost, and diversified, exchange-traded funds – otherwise known as ETFs.

What are the investing options in Singapore?

Ok, so if you want to buy stocks or ETFs – they’re both the same in that they’re traded daily on a public stock exchange – then you need to open a brokerage account.

Brokerage accounts are basically the platform for you to buy/sell any investments (in various global stock exchanges) and hold them.

Here’s a list of some of the biggest brokerage account providers in Singapore:

• Interactive Brokers
• Moomoo
• Tiger Brokers
• Saxo Bank
• WeBull
• ProsperUs
• FSMOne

Ok, so how do you go about opening a brokerage account at these places? You typically can just do this online with a service like Myinfo.

If you’re a foreigner, you may have to submit additional documents but it’s relatively simple to open something and start investing. That’s it really.

In my next post, I’ll cover how we can compare which brokerage to go with.