Buy and sell by text
Australian online share trading and wealth creation platform, Bell Direct, has launched an SMS share trading service.
Chief operating officer Lee Muco said Bell Direct’s introduction of SMS share trading into Australia provided investors with a new level of convenient and fast access to the share market by using their most familiar accessory, the mobile phone.
“As long as investors have their mobile phone handy, Bell Direct SMS share trading enables them to buy and sell shares if they are away from their computer,” Muco said.
Customers wanting to buy or sell via the new SMS service simply have to text message their order to Bell Direct in a simple buy/sell-stock code-quantity-price format. Shortly after, they’ll receive confirmation of the order, which, if correct, is then sent back with a hash-encoded time-stamp unique to that order.
According to Muco, while Australian investors have previously been able to trade shares via mobile phones, they have had to do so by using WAP internet access, which, compared to using SMS, can be complicated and expensive.
Bell Direct customers using SMS share trading will pay a fixed cost of 55 cents per SMS, while they will also benefit from Bell Direct’s online brokerage pricing of $15 per trade.
Although brand new to Australia, SMS share trading is already extremely popular in South East Asian markets such as China, Malaysia and South Korea.
According to a recent report by US firm Research & Markets, at the end of 2007 there were 1.48 million mobile stock traders in China, a figure forecast to rise to 2.58 million by the end of 2008.
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