Compare investment platforms
Account or subscription fee, brokerage on New Zealand and US shares, FX or currency conversion, custody or balance fees, and what each platform gives access to, for 7 investment platforms. Percentages keep their published minimums and caps, and a market the platform does not offer is never rendered as a zero fee.
Read from each issuer's own pages · The oldest figure here was read 38 days ago.How we compare What the platform prices do and do not compare
Brokerage is only one charge and only applies where the platform sells that market. The table keeps account or subscription fees, New Zealand and US brokerage, currency conversion and custody charges in separate columns, then states the markets and products available. A published percentage keeps its minimum, cap and pass-through charge in the same cell.
7 platforms, read from their own published pages.
3 of 7do not offer New Zealand-listed shares, so their NZ brokerage cell reads Not offered rather than zero.
1 of 7do not offer US-listed shares. Access is a column because an absent market cannot be compared on price.
1 stated nilcustody or balance fees are explicitly published as none. 2 more are not addressed by the platform and remain Not published.
6 columnskeep the recurring fee, two brokerage markets, FX, custody and access apart rather than combining unlike charges.
7 of 7 platforms
Not checked: we have not read this figure yet. None: the issuer publishes that there is no such fee. Not published: the issuer does not publish this figure. Not offered: the provider does not offer that market or product. * Details and conditions are in the expanded row.
How to read an investment platform price
Start with the access column. It states whether a platform sells New Zealand shares, US shares, funds, term deposits or another product in this collection. Only then do the brokerage columns describe a price for something the platform actually offers.
Read the fee columns together. A platform can publish zero brokerage and still charge for currency conversion, a subscription, custody or a balance. Each charge stays in the period and currency the platform publishes, and percentages keep their minimums and caps.
Six pricing traps in this collection
A percentage and a minimum are two figures
Where a platform publishes both, the cell keeps both. Tiger's NZ share pricing and ASB Securities' US pricing also carry separate pass-through or agency charges, so neither is flattened to one percentage.
FX can sit on another page
Currency conversion has its own column and its own figure source where needed. A brokerage page that omits FX is not evidence that conversion is free.
Zero brokerage is not zero cost
Kernel and Hatch publish no brokerage on the US investments named in their rows, while each publishes a currency-conversion charge. The two charges are never collapsed into a zero-cost claim.
A subscription keeps its published period
Sharesies' monthly plans and the yearly prices it publishes sit together. A monthly amount is never multiplied by twelve and presented as though the platform published that result.
Access is part of the comparison
4 of the 14 NZ and US brokerage cells read Not offered. They are unavailable markets, not zero-fee trades.
A closed platform is not a comparable row
Superhero is excluded because it closed its New Zealand operations and its New Zealand site redirects to the Australian platform. The method records the exclusion instead of leaving a dead price in the table.
Common questions
Does zero brokerage mean the trade costs nothing?
No. Read the FX, account or subscription, and custody columns as well. Zero in one charge does not state that every other charge is zero.
What does Not offered mean?
The platform does not give access to that market. It is kept apart from Not published, where the platform offers the relevant service but does not publish the figure checked for this table.
Why are subscriptions not annualised?
The table repeats the periods and prices the platform publishes. It does not create a yearly figure the source page did not state.
Does paying you move a platform up the table?
No. No platform pays for placement, and the source order remains until a reader chooses a column to sort.
Run the numbers
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