The best online share trading platforms in Australia in March 2024 | Mozo (2024)

Before you start, it pays to understand how share trading works. Read our guide to share trading for beginners, or browse some of the resources on theASX website. It’s also a good idea to brush up on how interest rates, exchange rates and government policy can affect the share market.

Once you’re confident in your knowledge, you can open an account with a share trading platform and start placing orders. The size of each order will be up to you, but most brokers will require your first trade to be at least $500 (this is known as the 'minimum marketable parcel of shares').

Keep in mind that each transaction will incur a brokerage fee, and if you buy only a small amount the fee will make up a larger percentage of your total investment. That means you might be waiting longer for your returns to even cover the cost of purchasing the asset.

Yes, share trading can be risky. The value of your shares can rise and fall over time, meaning there’s always a chance you could get back less money than you originally put in. And if you invest in a single company and it goes bankrupt, you could lose all of your initial outlay.

While there’s no way to completely eliminate the risk involved in share trading, there are ways to minimise it. For example, it’s recommended that you diversify your portfolio by spreading funds across a range of industries and asset classes, instead of honing in on just one or two.

As always, it pays to do plenty of research - on any particular asset you might be thinking of buying and on share trading in general - so that you have a clear idea of the risks involved.

If your brokerage platform is CHESS sponsored, you will be issued a Holder Identification Number (HIN) when you sign up. This is a tag that is unique to you, and any shares you buy will be attached to it.

This is much more preferable than a custodian model, where the shares you buy are held on your behalf under an “omnibus” HIN. While brokers that rely on a custodian model tend to be cheaper, there are tradeoffs. For one, you won’t technically own your shares, which unfortunately means you’ll be granted fewer protections.

Other measures you can take to ensure your shares stay in your possession include using two-factor authentication (if the platform you use offers it), which adds an additional layer of security to your portfolio.

An alternative to trying to predict future market price movements, dollar cost averaging involves regularly investing the same amount of money in an asset, regardless of price, over an extended period of time.

The idea is that by buying when the market is both up and down, you can reduce the average cost of shares bought.

How so? Since the amount of shares you can buy with a fixed sum of money is lower when the price is high, dollar cost averaging lets you buy more shares when they’re cheap and fewer shares when they’re expensive.

When you invest, you'll have to decide for yourself if what you're investing in (in other words, supporting financially) aligns with your ethics.

For example, choosing to buy shares in a fossil-fuel mining company may be unethical to you if you're concerned about climate change and the impact such companies have on the environment.

Luckily, there are still ways to invest in ethically-minded companies and industries.One such way is by looking into ESG funds, which are all about getting you maximum returns and maximum ethical impact.

There are also plenty of ETFs out there which claim to invest with an ethical frame of mind.

If you want to make money from buying and selling your stocks, then the basic principal is to 'buy low, sell high'.

In other words, you want to aim to sell your positions when the price is higher than what you bought them for.