I login to my DBS Vickers online account in November and noticed a mysterious fee charged to my account. It is the custodian fee for foreign stocks, which dbsv started charging in August silently. The amount is $2.14 per month per counter including GST.
To transfer the stocks outside to other broker, there is a fee of S$50 per counter. This is more expensive than doing a sell and a buy to transfer the stocks.
So I sold all my holdings from dbsv in November – vanguard total stock market ETF (VTI) and ABF PAIF Asia bond index ETF (2821.HK). I plan to use standard chartered bank to buy the ETFs back but have not gotten the time to do so.
As to dbsv, you were the broker I used to buy my first ETF (VTI) in 2005 when you were the only local broker who didn’t charge custodian fees for foreign stocks. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Hi choozm,
Good to hear from you, been a long time since there has been a update
Sad to hear that DBSV is now charging custodian fee.
I am just using Standard Chartered, Saxo, and DollarDex now.
Hi momo,
Good to hear from you too. Same same, using StanChart, Saxo and Dollardex.
Hi choozm,
Just a rant. When I asked Saxo to add Vanguard ETFs on LSE in May 2012, this is the reply I got:
“The below are ETF in GBP Currency which we currently do not support on LSE ,we only support GBx currency.”
Currently the ones in Saxo are the USD versions which have lower trading volume than the GBP ones (obviously!).
I’m also on SCB trading. It is my low cost ETF buying platform. Things are looking up now. All back to pre GFC levels.
Hi, I’m in the middle of deciding which trading platform to go for DBS vickers vs SCB.
I understand that DBS has recently raised their commissions and is charging custodian fees for non-sg products (personally planning to get world stock index VT). However, I also read that for SCB, even though you don’t pay on fees, you lose money through the foreign exchange rate when buying in USD.
I get the impression now that SCB will be useful for people who do DCA every month while DBS can still be ok for people who rebalance their portfolio every quarter or so in big amount.
Any thoughts on this?
Hi, I have relooked DBSV fee schedule and there is dividend collection fee 1% of Net Dividend, Minimum USD 4, Maximum USD 40. I remember there was no such fee before. You might want to call up DBS to clarify.
For SCB, from my observation, the fx loss is about 05%-1.0%. Let’s take 1.0%, plus the commission of 0.25%, it is 1.25% cost no matter how much you trade.
For DBSV, it can be cheaper provided you trade with higher frequency and amount. Let’s say I trade 4 times a year, each time USD3000. Total commission is USD25x4, plus custodian fee SGD1.61 (USD2) times 12 months. Total cost per year is USD119.32 or 119.32/12000 = 0.99%. However, I have not factored in the dividend collection fee, which is potentially another 1%.
I use SCB because personally:
1) I don’t trade much
2) I am OK with 1.25% fixed cost
3) I am lazy to calculate the cost for every trade to decide which of the two brokers to use.
YMMV.