Compare brokers bywhat your trades cost, the ASX trade fee, the US trade fee, the FX spread, CHESS or custody or interest on your cash.what your trades cost.the ASX trade fee.the US trade fee.the FX spread.CHESS or custody.interest on your cash.

On what a year of your trading would cost, not the headline brokerage alone. Some brokers charge a flat fee a trade and others a percentage, so the order changes with your trade size. We add up brokerage on ASX and US trades (with a broker's own ETF rates where it publishes them), the currency fee on US trades, and any account, market data or inactivity fees, priced on the trades you describe.

Yes. Side by side puts two brokers on one page and compares them on an ASX trade, a US trade or a year of your trading, fee by fee: brokerage, currency conversion, account and transfer fees, and interest on cash. Each line marks the lower fee, or the higher interest, with the gap between them. It never picks an overall winner.

They hold your shares differently. With CHESS sponsorship your shares sit on the company's register under your own Holder Identification Number (HIN), so they stay in your name if the broker fails. A custodian holds shares for you in its own name and records your part in its books. The law requires client assets to be kept apart from the broker's own, but after a failure you rely on those records. Each broker's details show which way it holds shares and its Australian Financial Services Licence number.

There are two fees instead of one. On top of the brokerage, the broker changes your Australian dollars into US dollars, and usually back again when you sell, taking a margin on the exchange rate. At 0.7%, that is $35 on a $5,000 trade, often more than the brokerage itself. Brokers charge very different margins, so we price the conversion into every US trade rather than leave it out.

For a first purchase of a company, the ASX's minimum parcel is $500, and many brokers apply it. Once you hold the company, later buys can be smaller. Some brokers let you start with less, usually by holding the shares for you or selling fractions of a share. Each broker's minimum trade is in its details where it publishes one.

Yes. Some brokers we track charge $0 brokerage on some or all ASX trades. A $0 trade can still come with other costs: a currency fee on US shares, or account or inactivity fees. Our yearly cost counts every fee we can price, so a broker with free trades sits beside the others on the same basis.

Shares on a HIN move from one CHESS-sponsored broker to another by a broker-to-broker transfer, which the receiving broker usually starts. Shares held by a custodian follow that broker's own process. Some brokers charge nothing to transfer shares out and others charge a fee; each broker's transfer-out fee is in its details where it publishes one.

From each broker's own pricing pages. There is no Consumer Data Right feed or regulator dataset for share trading, so we read each listed broker's pages each month and record what changed. Promotional rates and sign-up offers aren't recorded. Each broker's card says when its figures were last refreshed, and a fee a broker doesn't publish shows as a dash, never a guess.