How to transfer your portfolio
As finance evolves and traditional platforms fall behind the times, investors are increasingly transferring their ASX-listed securities to new stock investing platforms. Take Stake as an example.
Stake accepts as many share transfers as you’d like, free of charge (your incumbent platform might have other ideas). The process is fully digital, eliminating the need for piles of paperwork (again, some platforms are more old school on their end). Plus, if your first ASX transfer is worth at least $1,000 in total share value, you will get $3 off your brokerage fees for a year. (T&Cs apply).
Why switch? For one, we offer simple brokerage fees, $3 brokerage for trades up to $30,000, or 0.01% on trades above $30,000 (in AUD for Stake AUS and USD for Stake Wall St). With a slick trading experience to boot, why wouldn’t people switch? In finance, inertia loyalty doesn’t pay off.
But with hard-earned money on the line, it’s fair enough to wonder: how can you make sure your investments are safe when you make a transfer? Let’s take a look at what exactly happens in a portfolio transfer.
Once you decide whether to do a partial or full portfolio transfer, the first thing to figure out is how your shares are held. Are they issuer-sponsored shares? CHESS-sponsored, with your own HIN, as on Stake? Or under the custodian model? This is important because different types of shares will determine the type of transfer that is required. CHESS sponsored shares (held on a HIN) are done via a broker to broker transfer, and Issuer sponsored shares (SRN) are done via Issuer to CHESS conversion.
Next: are the shares to be held under the same entity or will there be a change in beneficial ownership of the shares?
With those answers in mind, you can consider the type of transfer that applies to you and see in the table below a breakdown of the costs and benefits.
Transferring stocks to Stake is a safe and secure process. It’s all initiated online and we have experts ready to walk you through it. Here are some tips they like to share:
Before submitting your transfer request, check if you have open orders on the securities you want to transfer, or any outstanding obligations with your current platform.
Double check you have the correct amount of units and company name/stock code to facilitate the process. Note some events can change your number of shares without you buying or selling any.
Make sure your signature is exactly like the one on the photo ID provided, and check that your registration details match, especially full name and postal address.
Once a transfer is initiated, don’t trade with the shares you’re transferring until we confirm the process has been completed.
Share transfers usually take about two business days, or 40 hours on average, more precisely. But it depends on the process where your external account is held. Don’t worry, though: we’ll keep you informed about the progress.
It bears repeating that Stake is a CHESS-sponsored investing platform, which offers investors full control and ownership of their stocks, and the ability to participate in corporate actions and get updates directly from the company and the registries, no intermediaries needed.
So if you’ve got shares elsewhere, it might be time to join so many of our 500,000 customers who go full Stake. Begin today by going to Portfolio Transfers in the Stake app.
If you have any questions, please reach out directly to share-transfers@stake.com.au and one of our friendly team will assist you
Stella is a markets analyst and writer with almost a decade of investing experience. With a Masters in Accounting from the University of Sydney, she specialises in financial statement analysis and financial modelling. Previously, she worked as an equity analyst at Australian finance start-up, Simply Wall St, where she took charge of the market insights newsletter sent out to over a million subscribers. At Stake, Stella has been key to producing the weekly Wrap articles and social media content.