Saxo Capital Markets has expanded its brokerage offering and announced some aggressive pricing as it moves to capture a bigger share of the online brokerage market.
Saxo launched SaxoTraderGO in the local market in 2015. It caters to a broad range of investors including those looking to trade contracts for difference and other sophisticated leveraged products.
The new service, Saxo Essential, offers access to local and international stocks, and bonds. It has a limited range of leveraged products, including global foreign exchange “pairs”, and CFD index trackers covering the Australian, US, European, UK, Japanese and Hong Kong equity indexes.
Saxo Capital Markets Australia chief executive Ben Smoker says the new service incorporates additional risk management functionality, with limited loss and limited leverage.
“With our new account, losses on leveraged products will not be able to exceed cash deposits. We’ve also imposed margin restrictions around certain exposures,” Smoker says.
“A lot of investors start trading stocks and bonds and then get interested in leveraged products. They know there is risk and we are giving them an opportunity to trade in a limited-risk environment.”
Smoker says there has been steady, if modest, growth in the use of CFDs and other leveraged products over the past few years.
He says Saxo is anticipating changes that are likely to be legislated later this year, when new law imposes design and distribution obligations on issuers of financial products to make sure their products are aligned the target market.
Last December, the Government circulated a draft bill that covers the new design and distribution obligations, Treasury Laws Amendment (Design and Distribution Obligations and Product Intervention Powers) Bill 2018.
Saxo has come up with some aggressive pricing to kick off Saxo Essential, including $6.99 on ASX equity trades and very low foreign exchange spreads.
Saxo’s was one of three online share trading platforms to be awarded top ratings in a recent Canstar rating of international share trading platforms. The others were IG Markets and Interactive Brokers Australia.
