TD Ameritrade Alternatives

Two days ago, TD Ameritrade Singapore abruptly announced that they will only be focusing on Accredited Investors (AI) and non-AI users have less than a month to leave or they will charge a hefty monthly account maintenance fee of USD 50 from 27 Oct 2023.

This is extremely disappointing as I personally really liked their interface for trading options, and of course their cheap fees. But in response to their lack of consideration by issuing such a short notice period, and their unpredictability, we have decided to also start migrating our holdings out of them as one cannot predict what other changes they be announcing next.

If you are also looking for a brokerage to trade in the US market, allow us to share again that we have collaboration with various brokerages that will allow you to trade US stocks and options. In addition, if you sign up via StocksCafe, you will also get free StocksCafe subscription.

Tiger Brokers

I would like to recommend Tiger Brokers for your consideration as I will be personally migrating most, if not all, of my TDA assets and trading activities over.

The main reasons are as follows:

1. Competitive Commission & Fees
   If you look carefully at their pricing for US stocks, they are only charging USD 0.01 per share (min USD 1.99 per order). For US options, they are only charging USD 0.65 per contract (which is cheaper than TDA). On top of these, they are running many promotions where users can get rewards ranging from free shares & vouchers to life-time 0 commission.
   
2. Auto-Sync Transactions
   Personally, I trade options regularly and manually entering options trades is definitely a pain since it has more fields (i.e. strike price and expiry date) than normal buy/sell transactions.
   
   Although it is not released yet, we are actually currently working with Tiger brokers’ engineers to set up auto-sync with them (just like with uSmart) so there is no need to manually enter trades if you use Tiger brokers.
   
3. Slick UI – This is more of a personal preference, but the two platforms that I like trading US stocks & options on are TD and Tiger as I can easily customize both platforms so that I can have all the information I want at my finger tips.

Note: Tiger has prepared an easy guide for you to transfer your position from TD Ameritrade to Tiger brokers, with no fees charged on Tiger’s end for the transfer.

Sign Up Via StocksCafE

If you sign up with Tiger via StocksCafe’s referral from now till 31 Oct 2023 and fund your account with at least SGD 1, you will get 3 months of StocksCafe subscription, plus the ability to auto-sync your transactions (once it is released).

In addition, as you continue to trade using Tiger platform, StocksCafe will reward you with more free subscription. Please read this page for more details.