What’s the best broker/ bank for foreigners to invest in Taiwan? By ‘best’ I mean the ones that will open a brokerage account for a foreign national (with TWN residency) without a fuss.
P.S: in temp because I believe I saw this discussion here before but I couldn’t find it from the search function. Mods please move to the right thread.
I have an account with Yuanta. They’re the largest and opened an account for me without too much trouble. Still takes two hours or so but once it’s set up you can place orders through their app and don’t need to go back.
Was it a regular account or one specific for trading stocks?
I went to Yuanta Securities to open a stock trading account. In the process, they asked me to also open a linked bank account at Yuanta Bank. You can’t have money in a stock trading account. It stays in the bank account until it is used for stock purchases (and commissions).
Is the Yuanta platform good interface wise?
I also have an account with Taishin Securities, which is a smaller firm. The Yuanta app is much easier to use. It’s still all in Chinese, but the main functions (i.e. how to see your portfolio, how to buy and sell) are easy to figure out and not hidden in some sub-menus.
I don’t understand the local market well, so I only invest in ETFs and don’t trade on a regular basis. Maybe someone who trades more actively has a different view on this.
A couple of weeks ago my sister-in-law, who’s in finance here in Taiwan, help me set up a brokerage account with Fubon Securities - that one chosen because I already have a Fubon account, and she couldn’t see big differences between the different platforms. (She uses Yuanta, I believe.) Setting it up took a couple of hours at the bank and there’s no way I could have managed it with my middling-at-best Chinese. I have an APRC; I don’t know if that’s necessary. There are a few limits on foreigners, but I forget what exactly they were: the one I noticed was that, apparently, it’s impossible to set up some kind of automatic deposit into ETFs (a pity, because that’s the main thing I’d like).
Get used to signing your Chinese name. I had to do that a lot. Of course, I have no idea what I signed.
I haven’t actually used the account yet, because I have no idea how the interface works, and that’ll wait for the next time we visit the in-laws. I do know the website platform seriously irked me the first time I signed in: you register at the bank, they mail you the password, you need to change the password - that kind of stuff. But it’s one of those sites which uses pop-up windows to log in, and like many sensible people I have pop-ups disabled, but no alert was asking to open a pop-window, so … yeah, that took a few minutes to figure out. But I seldom encounter a Taiwan-based website that doesn’t irk me.
There’s an app. I don’t know how to use it yet.
Like @rooftopclown, my intention for this is just ETFs and the like, with almost no active trading.
Are there any limitations other than the automatic deposit? Can foreigners invest in all stocks here? Index etc?
Dunno. The list of limitations was longer than what I bothered to figure out, but my sister-in-law knows I just want low-level steady investing, rather than much trading, so she didn’t bother translating the stuff that she didn’t think was relevant. (We had to do that A LOT during the afternoon of registration.)
Index funds and stocks are fine. Not sure about more complex things like futures and options.
Futures and options fine.
Need to sign up a separate futures account. All those local securities houses have futures department.
Taiwanese like warrants more than options.
Some stocks have 20 or more warrants. You can buy them through the standard brokerage account as they sell in lots, like stocks do.
Have both short and long warrants.
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