Supplementary information:

The online US stock brokers mainly include Xue Ying Securities, Futu Securities and Tiger Securities. We mainly examine these three brokers from two aspects: safety, cost and threshold.

It should be noted that since the object of this survey is a novice American ordinary stockbroker, we will not consider the following points for the time being:

1. supports advanced trading categories and gameplay, such as options, short selling, financing interest rate, etc.

2. Support other trading markets. These brokers generally support Hong Kong stock trading. Which brokerage firm is most suitable for trading in Hong Kong stocks is not the scope of our discussion;

3. People who are not in China may have better choices in other countries. For example, people in America and Australia can choose Robinhood；;

First, security: as safe as foreign traditional brokers.

Security is a problem that we must consider. After all, as China people, we bought American stock assets in China with US dollars. How to ensure the safety of our funds? For example, if the domestic Internet brokers go bankrupt, will my money be wasted?

Don't worry about this at all. We have already introduced the operation mode of domestic Internet brokers, which is actually the institutional customers of large foreign brokers. When you buy stocks, your trading instructions are submitted by domestic brokers to large foreign brokers. In terms of funds, your money is actually not in the hands of domestic brokers, or even in the hands of foreign brokers.

Then where is your money? In fact, your money is in the escrow bank account designated by foreign brokers.

Take Yingtong, the largest foreign brokerage firm, as an example. Several mainstream Internet brokers in China were once agents of Yingtong. We are to domestic brokers as domestic brokers are to Yingtong. Domestic brokers, as customers of Yingtong, deposit their funds in Yingtong's custodian bank accounts, such as Citibank and Wells Fargo. Not only do domestic brokers have no access to this money, but even they cannot directly misappropriate it.

Therefore, whether the domestic brokerage firms fail or the foreign brokerage firms fail, it will not affect your capital security.

In addition, if you compare yourself with several domestic American stock brokers, you will find that they all take the bankruptcy protection of Stock million dollars as their propaganda point. What the hell is this? In fact, the protection system for investors in the American securities market is quite perfect. SIPC, the full name of which is Securities Investor Protection Company, is a non-profit organization, which is equivalent to all securities firms setting up a mutual insurance company. Once the broker goes bankrupt, SIPC can provide insurance of up to $500,000.

Therefore, you don't have to worry about the bankruptcy of domestic brokers or foreign brokers. Conversely, there is no need to worry that domestic brokers are not as safe as foreign brokers. As long as you are sure that this domestic brokerage firm is docked with a regular and reliable foreign brokerage firm, then they are also safe.

Several domestic US stock brokers have basically docked with Yingtong. Yingtong is one of the largest securities companies in the United States, founded in 1977, with its own assets exceeding $6 billion. 20 17 In June, Yingtong * * * held 10 billion customer assets. Of every 1 0 stock and option transactions handled by exchanges around the world,10 was completed through Yingtong Securities.

Second, cost and threshold.

Because there is no substantial difference in security between domestic brokers and foreign brokers, a large part of the reasons for choosing domestic brokers come from transaction costs and thresholds. So which cost and threshold is the lowest?

The first is the threshold for opening an account. Most foreign traditional brokers have minimum deposit requirements for opening accounts, and they also need to add management fees and real-time market subscription fees every month. Take Yingtong as an example. To open an account, a natural person over the age of 25 must deposit $65,438+00,000 in assets, and often need to add $65,438+00 in monthly management fees. If your account balance assets are less than $2,000, the monthly management fee will be higher. In addition, the commission for each transaction is also very high.

Domestic Internet American stock brokers act as a middleman between you and Yingtong, but with this middleman, the requirements for thresholds and fees are greatly reduced. In the table below, we list the minimum deposit requirements and minimum balance requirements for these domestic securities firms when opening accounts. It can be seen that basically domestic brokers are exempt from this series of related fees and thresholds.

1. Minimum deposit for opening an account: Futu (no, it can withdraw more than HK$ 20,000), Xue Ying (above US$ 3,000 without benefits) and Tiger (above US$ 3,000 without benefits).

2. Every time when stocks are traded, domestic brokers also offer more favorable commission prices than the stock market. Note that brokerage commission and external fees are required when buying and selling. Brokerage commission is the fee charged by brokers, and external fees are the fees charged by securities institutions and exchanges in the United States. When selling, in addition to these two fees, the US Financial Supervisory Authority and the US Securities Regulatory Commission also have corresponding fees, but they are very, very low and are ignored here. It can be seen that Tiger Securities is the most expensive, with a single minimum of $2.98. Xue Ying's commission and financing interest are the lowest among the three companies.

3. In addition, China investors enjoy preferential treatment of capital gains tax and dividend tax in the US stock market. For China investors, they only need to fill in the W_8BEN form to be exempted from capital gains tax. In fact, you don't need to know how to fill out and submit this form. After obtaining your relevant information, domestic American stock brokers will automatically help you take effect and submit the W_8BEN form. In addition, it should be noted that the dividend tax of Futu is not 10%, which may be related to the registration of Futu's main body in Hong Kong.