Macquarie Bank will be throwing the door open to the online US share trading market by giving their customers access to a US online broker for $US39.95 ($A72.18) a trade.
Macquarie announced today that a Letter of Intent had been signed with US company AmeriVest which enables Macquarie customers to set up brokerage accounts with Ameritrade.
Macquarie expects the service to be available to its customers by March.
Macquarie’s rationale behind the move appears to be based on the growing interest in the US markets demonstrated by Australian investors in the last four years. Macquarie financial services executive Christopher Fellas says that trading in US shares has more than doubled since 1996.
“Australian retail and wholesale investors have purchased an average of $A1.2 billion of US shares a month during 2000, compared with an average of $A308 million per month in 1996,” he says.
Fellas says Macquarie predicts that up to two fifths of its retail customers will have traded foreign securities over the next five years.
Macquarie currently has a customer base of 400,000.
