Stock Broker Comparison: COL Financial vs BPI Trade

I encountered a detailed comparison between  BPI Trade and COL Financial by G. M. Domingo and thought it was pretty detailed hence It would be useful to guide the Filipino Investors out there in making their decision on choosing their first online Stock Broker.

Enjoy his comparison between the two from his personal experience. Cheers!

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I have accounts on both BPI Trade and COL Financial. Sadly, as much as I like the bank, BPI Trade has caused me lots of headaches, whereas COL is better in almost all criteria. I sincerely hope BPI does some bold moves to fix their processes.

Here are their comparisons based from my personal experiences:

BPI Trade

• Application: So hard and so complicated (this is the most tiring part, believe me -- you apply online, print, bring the form personally to any branch, wait for weeks for their email to arrive, then the email arrives but everything is confusing and you still won't be able to open your account, then finally you call their hotline to ask for the initial password. And as additional surprise, you still have to enrol your BPI Trade Account Number to your BPI Express Online so you can do fund transfer. To do this, you have to again enrol online, print, bring form to the bank then wait for days again until you see it in your Express Online account. Note that all of these take about 3-5 weeks to finish.

Best Stock Broker in the Philippines

Choosing your first stockbroker is one of the first hurdles that every self-directed investors/traders have to accomplish towards achieving their financial goals.

According to Wikipedia, a stockbroker is a regulated professional individual, usually associated with a brokerage firm or broker-dealer, who buys and sells stocks and other securities for both retail and institutional clients, through a stock exchange or over the counter, in return for a fee or commission.

Given this, the question: "Who's the best stockbroker?" is usually the first question the comes to mind. But in a relatively young stock market such as the Philippines, investors who are just starting out usually find themselves in a difficult situation on answering this question because there is very few information out there.

So our friends in PinoyMoneyTalk.com (PMT) conducted a survey on who is the best stockbroker in the Philippines to help guide those eyeing to open their first stock trading account. Below are the results as of this writing.

We hope this consolidated lists help you in deciding on w/c Philippine-based stock broker you will open an account with.