How Tiger Brokers and Futu Singapore are changing the investing experience (and I love it!)

For most investors, it’s impossible to not hear about the newest online trading platforms, Tiger Brokers and moomoo (Futu Singapore) with their aggressive user acquisition marketing campaigns.

After signing up on both platforms and playing around with the apps for a few weeks, I can see strong reasons to move away from the traditional online brokerages and performing my investment trades on one of these two platforms.

Word of advice, this post is very long so if you just want to check out the free shares and benefits that you’ll get for opening an account with Tiger Brokers and moomoo, click here to skip ahead.

The problems with traditional online brokerages

I must first declare that my experience with traditional online brokerages are limited to DBS Vickers and Standard Chartered Online Trading so readers who have more investment experience may think differently.

In the world of traditional online brokerages, the competition has mostly been centered around fees. Investors would flock to the online brokerage who is able to offer the lowest fee to perform a trade.

The process of signing up for an account is often lengthy and takes ages to complete. In this Internet age, it literally feels like an era just to get access to a new brokerage account.

While the user interface of all the traditional online brokerages differ, their platform’s functionality are very similar and that is to allow you to make investment trades. Some online brokerage platforms have tools that allow you to perform basic technical analysis and fundamental data analysis but I don’t use them because:

1. The tools like stock screening are too basic to make meaningful decisions
2. The user interface is too complicated to use and hard to navigate around
3. The level of company and market data isn’t in-depth enough for me to research about stocks that I’m interested in

Most investors would depend on a number of platforms to keep abreast of the latest news, conduct research and perform both fundamental and technical analysis to identify the stocks to invest in, before returning to their online brokerage platforms to make that trade. Even then, the user experience on the brokerage platform isn’t great because the UI of some of these online brokerages looked outdated and worse of all, some of these legacy trading platforms lag badly.

Of course, it could be because that I don’t trade often and therefore am not up to date with the latest updates that traditional online brokerages have made to their platforms. Let me know if I’m wrong in the comments section below. 🙂

Tiger Brokers and moomoo are changing the game

I know you have probably read many other articles that from bloggers who have done comparisons of their fees structure one way or another so I’m not going to bore you with another similar comparison.

But you can trust me when I say they are easily one of the online brokerages, especially for someone like me who neither perform frequent trades nor make large investments regularly.

Instead, let’s look at the other non-monetary factors that sets Tiger Brokers and moomoo are offering that makes them so much better than the traditional online brokerages.

In-depth analysis and market data

When I need to research on a particular stock in the past, most of the research had to done on a laptop with a decent size screen because of all the number crunching that needed to be done, together with all the websites and reports opened up for information gathering.

Today, most of this work is done with the Tiger Broker and moomoo apps. I am very impressed with how Tiger Broker and moomoo managed to squeeze everything into a mobile screen in a beautiful user interface that makes stock research easy for their users.

The user interface on both Tiger Brokers and moomoo beautiful and they are able to display all the necessary financial and valuation statistics at a glance with beautiful charts and layouts. It’s also very easy to access related news about the company, posts about the company within the community.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

To examine the company further financially, I can easily find detailed financial and valuation analysis about the company in a visually aesthetic display, on top of all the quarterly and annual financial reports published by the company for the past 5 years.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

Traditional online brokerages (at least the ones I used) typically do not provide any in-depth market data because It also costs a lot of money provide their users with access to such market data on their platforms.

Tiger Brokers and moomoo however, are more generous in paying to provide market data to their users through their apps, at least for now. Both Tiger Brokers and moomoo are offering free L2 market data for US (NYSE) as a promotion and I imagine it may eventually move into a subscription model (moomoo already has a Quotation Mall feature set up for this).

This is useful when you want to know how much other investors are bidding for the stock that you intend to trade in real-time.

Consolidated news and reports

I find that it’s easy to identify companies with good fundamentals that are worth a spot in our portfolio but it’s always not the right time or price to make that investment immediately. As a result, I would add these companies into my watchlist to wait patiently for a good opportunity to invest in them.

What creates a good opportunity?

It could be a sudden turn of market sentiments, a quarter earnings report that missed or exceeded expectations or breaking news about the company’s performance.

What I love about Tiger Brokers and moomoo is that everything I’ve mentioned above are available within their apps.

I can choose to zoom in on a specific company to learn about its latest news, or zoom out to check out the holistic view of the market performance. I can also retrieve a list of all the news related to the stocks in my watchlist to quickly catch up on the latest news and trends.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

This keeps me on top of what’s happening to the companies in my watchlist and saves me a lot of time and hassle of going through all the different news and investing websites to search for relevant news.

Live streams of earnings and performance conference videos

I’ve never bothered about tuning in to earnings and performance conference calls by the companies in my watchlist because it was too tedious to search and create a schedule of all the earnings and performance conference videos (maybe I didn’t know how to do it efficiently).

I also didn’t have access to the online brokerages that offer direct access to all the calls in one single platform simply because those platforms were too expensive for my investment needs.

Tiger Broker offers a list of all the earnings and performance conference calls from companies around the world in their Community category, under the ‘Live’ section. I don’t think the list contains every single earnings and performance conference calls across the globe but they do have the ones that interest me.

Tiger Brokers

The app also made it easy to schedule and be notified when the live call starts so that I could tune in to the session in real-time. I do that from time to time but in most cases, I simply listen to the playbacks of those calls whenever I have time.

While it is useful to listen to earnings and performance calls to hear what the management has to say about their performance, I find it even more meaningful to listen to the pointed questions that were asked in the Q&A sessions by investment experts from leading brokerages and funds to learn about what these investment experts are looking at when they assess these companies.

Innovative suite of tools and screeners

As someone who invests mostly in ETFs, I seldom use tools and screeners but after attending the SG Budget Babe Readers’ Investment Workshop previously, I learnt how to compile financial and technical statistics to analyse companies to invest in.

This can be rather tedious with all the different formulas to apply especially when we have to do this repeatedly to find that 1 out of 100 company that fits the bill.

Both Tiger Brokers and moomoo are able to help me to save a lot of time because most of these financial and technical statistics have already been calculated and displayed within their apps. From basic financial ratios to detailed financial statements, they are all accessible on both Tiger Brokers and moomoo apps easily.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

Apart from the easy to use stock screener on both apps, they also have additional tools that help their users identify companies that meet their criteria. I particularly like moomoo’s Stock Compare feature which allows me to select up to 6 stocks and compare their valuations, financial data and indicators at one glance.

moomoo

The Strategies feature in moomoo and the Classic Technical Selector in Tiger Brokers allow users to find stocks that exhibited classic candlestick patterns quickly. This makes the life of day traders so much easier by taking away all the grunt work that needs to be done every day.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

The Candlestick Technical Selector in Tiger Brokers is also very interesting because it allows users who are very experienced in technical analysis to find stocks that exhibited a combination of candlestick that based on their experienced, have a high probability of experiencing a surge in their stock prices.

Tiger Brokers

AI-powered stock recommendations

In this era of big data analysis, I’m always curious how investors could use artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to simplify their stock analysis workflow. While I don’t think the technology has matured to the level where mass adoption is possible yet, but I feel that Tiger Brokers and moomoo provides an interesting insight into how artificial intelligence and machine learning can complement investment strategies in the near future.

The AI monitor feature in moomoo helps users monitor the volatility of all the stocks in the major markets and identify stocks that have shown abnormal behaviours. The feature uses abnormal trading volume and abnormal price movements to help users identify stocks that have potential trading opportunities.

moomoo

Tiger Broker’s Tiger Lab feature takes a different approach in using quantitative strategy research from Tiger Broker’s quantitative team to present unique quantitative investment strategies and stock recommendations that meet its strategy criteria to its users. While the win rate statistics and average revenue percentage are very impressive, these strategies are pretty much black-box models that provide very little clarity around how the models work.

Tiger Brokers

Both Tiger Brokers and moomoo have very interesting AI features in their apps and I would use the recommendations and insights as a point of consideration while researching on stocks to invest in.

Rewards you for participating in the community

I have written a lot about the intangible benefits that Tiger Brokers and moomoo offer that the traditional online brokerages have failed to offer for years. Now let’s look at the tangible rewards.

Traditional online brokerages have one thing in common. Once they succeed in getting you to open an account with them, they cease all form of marketing communication with you. You’re on your own from there.

Tiger Brokers and moomoo behave more like the typical startup where getting you to sign up is just the start of the process.

Apart from attracting new customers with free shares and discount vouchers for making investment trades, both platforms also focus on getting their users to keep returning to their app by increasing app stickiness with gamification rewards.

The daily tasks and goals that Tiger Brokers and moomoo have on their platforms are fairly similar.

Users are rewarded with in-app virtual currency (coins or points) for returning to their app to check-in and participate in their community by reading their news articles, writing a post in their community, etc.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

With the coins or points, users can redeem for benefits.

Tiger Broker and moomoo offer very different kind of rewards to their users.

Rewards from moomoo are more brand focused. They allow users to use their points to redeem moomoo merchandises such as figurines, neck pillow, cushion and money box. Users can also use points to reset their paper trading accounts which is useful for paper traders who are doing different paper trading experiments on the moomoo platform.

Rewards offered by Tiger Brokers are more practical. They allow users to use their Tiger coins to redeem access to premium videos by Reuters, stock vouchers and commission-free trade cards.

Tiger Brokers

moomoo

Personally, I am more of a minimalist so I would prefer the rewards from Tiger Brokers because in exchange for my time spent on the app, I get to reduce the cost of my investment trades.

Which platform should you choose?

In terms of ease of use, I find Tiger Brokers easier to use while some may find otherwise.

Both platforms are equally rich in news content but Tiger Brokers have a slight advantage in terms of offering premium Reuter video content and live earnings and performance conferences.

For stock screening and analysis, both platforms are equally good in their stock screening and analysis so I believe you really can’t go wrong with either one. Tiger Brokers and moomoo have their own strengths in AI innovation and I’m excited to see what comes next from both platforms.

My personal recommendation is to simply get both. I’m staying on both platforms for now because they both have their own unique advantages and I’m excited to see what they have to offer in future.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash