By the way, I have a little trick. I got 4 lots of 5 free trades...

By the way, I have a little trick. I got 4 lots of 5 free trades from referrals by this trick.

I'm a member of OzBargain and on that site, they let you enter your referral codes into your account settings (for 100s of websites, including SelfWealth) and I did so. When somebody sees a bargain about SelfWealth on OzBargain, there's a random referral generator that people can click on. It'll choose a random referral code like mine and then I'll get 5 free trades and that person who signs up will too.

The analytics on OzBargain says that 6 people have clicked the link using my code, and I know that about 4 have signed up and made a trade, so I got 20 free trades total (since 02/08/2019 - 2 months). That's a high conversion rate from OzBargain members clicking out to SelfWealth and signing up.

OzBargain shows 464 random referral links, so me getting 4 referrals suggests 1800 sign-ups from (or through) OzBargain since 2 August. That sounds extreme considering that there was an increase of 4200 active traders in July-Sept, but it's possible (50% of sign-ups could be attributable to OzBargain? Sounds barely believable.). So there may be a huge take-up of the referral program, driving a lot of the organic growth.

I guess that's still ok. They sign up for the free trades, but should still stick around for the cheap brokerage. It still matches with their 'bargain hunting' mentality. At the very least, the higher penetration/market share will help word of mouth among non-bargain hunters, so it'd encourage growth in regular customer segments too. It may just be high penetration in bargain hunter circles in advance of higher general penetration.

You'd expect the bargain hunters to care about interest on their cash, so to avoid keeping much in a 0% brokerage account. They do often speak about things like interest rates. But looking at the quarterly numbers, people do on average keep $6500 cash in their brokerage account. The average numbers should speak truth.