Banter and general comments, page-31825

I don't have the answer to that one, but I do know that I've had orders settled where some of the shares in the order were filled as centre point trades as part of using one of these partial share platforms. They can at least be one side of the transaction. One example was in January when I had a $0.46 limit buy on a company and 3012 shares in the order were filled at 45.75c.

Depending on your preferences, these partial share platforms can offer opportunities that weren't readily available before. What you give up in using the partial share platform is that you only indirectly hold the shares so you can't log into Computershare or another share registry and see your holding - you instead log into the platform and see any holdings. Depending on how well the individual scheme is designed, you may or may not be able to participate in all actions normally available to shareholders like AGM voting and participating in share placement plans. That's something to review closely on any scheme chosen and these abilities may vary by country. Actions like dividends are paid directly into the partial share platform cash account. Actions like splits, consolidations, takeovers etc will all happen normally.

The upside is a wider range of investing options (frequently involving a heap of US shares). You can do small trades without being killed by brokerage. Trades may be specified by the number of shares bought with standard limit pricing options. The companies typically simplify investing so that you might put in an order to buy $50 Core shares. If brokerage was 2% they then take out a $1.00 fee and invest $49.00. If the shares bought were at 39.5c then you would end up owning 124.0506 shares. This structure means you can do previously impossible trades like investing $10 into MinRes. At least one (S h a r e s i e s) has recently changed its Australian orders so they were capped at A$15/trade and yes that is a cap that still applies to larger orders. I haven't tested it with a $100k+ order but It was nice only paying A$15.00 brokerage on a $70k order. Its been a lot more than that through any standard brokerage firm I've used and that rate is available to anyone, not just a high volume trader. The partial share platforms do have their quirks around the speed of processing orders. Often its great but it can be slow on low-liquidity stocks particularly if their internal rules don't have them pushing up the price to fill an order. You can get the situation of sellers at 2.0c, you have a buy up to 2.0c and your order is sitting there at 1.9c waiting for someone to sell into it.

Sometimes you can get quirks that the partial share platform has enough shares that its viewed as an institutional investor and offered a spot in institutional share placements. I've seen this happen in NZ but I'm not sure if its happened yet in Australia. Obviously a quick response is needed in such instances.