5 benefits of consolidating your trading accounts

Here we outline five reasons to consolidate your trading accounts. And with Bell Direct, transferring your shares from one account to another is as easy as completing a one-page broker-to-broker form.

1. Singular view of all your investments

With all your trades going through one account, it’s a much simpler process to keep track of your stock holdings and your financial position. With a single login, you can view your entire portfolio, monitor the performance of all your investments, and access your contract note history and monthly cash account statements.

2. Easier to manage

With centralised transactions, you can easily track and update all your trades without needing to access several different accounts. With Bell Direct, you can easily buy and sell from your computer or mobile (using our trading app), and refer to our stock quotes, live news feeds, company announcements and fully-interactive charting technology to assist with your decision making.

3. Ease of reporting come tax time

Tax time can be painful. To make as easy as possible, we provide all our clients a free and automatically generated financial year summary report. This innovative and easy to read report includes details like your account summary, holdings valuation, cash account summary, transaction summary, brokerage and information services, and estimated dividend summary.

It’s a solution that results directly from client feedback on simplifying end-of-year account keeping.

4. You can save money

Directing all your trading activity through some account can save you money – allowing more spare change to invest with! At Bell Direct, the more trades you do with us, the lower the transaction fee is.

For your first ten trades in any given month, fees per trade will start from $15, but if you place more than ten trades, fees start from $13. Place more than 30 trades and your fees can fall to as low as $10 a trade. If you’re spreading your trades across multiple accounts, it will be harder to reach the threshold to benefit from these economies of scale.

5. More effective planning

Having an overview of all your entire portfolio in one centralised place helps with planning your future trades and investment activity. With a bird’s-eye view showing how all your shares are performing, you’ll be better able to determine when to enter or exit a particular stock or sector. Seeing the big picture also makes it clearer when you are overweight or underweight certain sectors, alerting you to the need to diversify or otherwise restructure your portfolio.

Transfer your holding from another broker easily here.