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We give share trading platforms a score so that we may give them a ranking in our Finder Awards, 'Best online broker' page, top broker picks displayed at the top of selected pages and for star ratings on review pages.
Set up by Finder's data scientists and investment experts, our algorithm takes into account broker fees, trading tools, educational resources and the list of available stock markets on each platform.
Our top picks are displayed at the top of many of our share trading guides and feature 3-5 'Best for X' categories.
The brokers are awarded titles using the methodology below and Finder's editorial team decides which top picks to display based on research around user demand.
There's no getting around the fact that a lot of share trading platforms have complicated fee structures. The brokerage fee (sometimes called the commission) can depend on how often you trade per month, how much you spend per trade and which country the stocks you're buying are from.
Broker fee structures are also completely different across the board. While some brokers offers flat fees, others are "tiered", meaning the more frequently you trade the lower your fee, or percentage-based, where the more you trade the more you pay. Others are a combination of tiered, percentage-based and flat.
To narrow this down, we compare the total broker fees a person would need to pay if they made 1 to 30 trades per month at trade values of between $100 and $10,000. We also compared fees for stocks listed in Australia, the US and the UK, which are the three most popular share trading markets in Australia.
By doing this, we can evaluate which online brokers are better suited to various trading styles such as active traders, long-term investors, ASX investors and global share trading investors.
Along with broker fees, we looked at whether share trading platforms had the following features:
Our selected brokerage fee categories and trading features are weighed based on the expertise of Finder's banking and investments team as well as user research to show which features are the most important to different investor types. The ratios may change as we update the formula to provide a better comparison experience for our users.
No, but we're trying our best to make that happen. Because it takes a long time to find and properly analyse broker fees and features, and it's important that we don't share misinformation, we're not able to cover 100% of the market. However, we do list the majority of Australia's most popular and well-regarded online brokers.
The process of gathering this data in Australia is quite manual. Our banking and investment team hunts down online brokers that are available to most Australian users and exclude those that are limited to "wholesale" (i.e. professional).
We also exclude platforms that don't offer direct share trading via a stock exchange – this includes most robo-advisers, micro-investment platforms and CFD providers that only offer stock CFDs.
Star ratings are displayed on our broker review and 'broker vs broker' pages to help you identify strengths and weaknesses. To find an overall score, we take into account six key categories:
Scoring criteria | |
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Fees |
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Available countries |
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Available securities |
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Trading tools |
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Research and education |
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Customer support |
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Overall |
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