Online investment provider Six Park is temporarily reducing its minimum investment threshold and waiving investment management fees to encourage more Australians to invest.
The firm would drop its minimum investment from $10,000 to $5,000 until the end of August and waive fees on new accounts for the first three months.
Six Park’s co-chief executive, Pat Garrett, said the rebound in the stockmarket was prompting more people to consider investing.
It had already seen a quarter of existing clients top up their portfolios during the period.
“Six Park was founded to give more Australians a pathway to financial wellbeing, so it is important to us to react to the current landscape in a way that reflects our core ethos.
“With the ability to now have multiple accounts per user, existing clients can take advantage of the lower entry point and use Six Park to achieve more, setting up different investment ‘buckets’ to meet different timeframes and goals.”
However, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) warned this week about retail investors who were chasing the markets. It said there had been a sharp increase in the number of new retail investors – up by a factor of 3.4 times – as well as marked increase in re-activated dormant accounts.
“We found that some retail investors are engaging in short-term trading strategies unsuccessfully attempting to time price trends. Trading frequency has increased rapidly, as has the number of different securities traded per day, and the duration for holding the securities has significantly decreased: indicating a concerning increase in short-term and ‘day-trading’ activity,” the regulator said.
