BROKERAGE firm AAA Equities Inc. is venturing into the online stock-brokerage business, offering a new feature for investors that allows an automatic execution of trades, such as cutting losses and buying during breakouts, while they are away.
William Matthew M. Cabangon, the company’s president, said the new feature is a game changer in the industry as no other online broker in the country offers such a feature. There are about 22 online brokers in the country, most of them, like AAA Securities, have existing brokerage firms.
“This is game changing for traders, who previously had to watch the market’s every move, or else risk losing money by missing key buy-and-sell targets,” Cabangon said.
Cabangon said they would use the feature with the proprietary system developed by Dubai-partner Direct FN.
“For example, traders will be able to automatically send a sell order for a stock at P100 if the stock ever goes below that price in real-time,” Cabangon said.
“For sophisticated traders who are familiar with technical analysis, AAA Equities offers unprecedented control over their trade execution. The automation of their strategy enables them to generate and send orders faster than they previously could, giving them a big speed edge in the hyper-competitive market,” he said.
He said the feature is allowed by regulators since the investors themselves will manually input the key data such as the floor and ceiling prices.
Cabangon said the feature would be useful for investors who balance trading with their professional career.
“It allows them to set their strategy before the trading day begins with ‘off-hours order.’ These orders are sent to the exchange automatically once the market opens,” he said.
Cabangon said this positions AAA Equities in the future of the stockbrokerage industry, particularly with just 1 percent of the population investing in the stock market.
AAA Equities’s online trading platform will be formally unveiled on March 1.
The 1 percent of the population that invests in the stock market is far behind that of their top 5 Southeast Asian peers like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, Cabangon said.
The Philippine Stock Exchange said online stock-market accounts rose 28 percent in 2017, while trading activity from the segment slightly improved.
Citing its Stock Market Investor Profile Report 2017, online stock-market accounts rose to 388,864 from 302,516 in 2016. Trading activity from these accounts, however, only accounted for 11 percent of total trading value in 2017, a slight increase from 9 percent during the previous year. Value turnover from online accounts rose by 13 percent to P372.06 billion from P329.64 billion in 2016.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes