Review: POEMS

The Bottom Line

POEMS is the online trading platform of Phillip Securities, which is a Singapore-based, MAS licensed broker and dealer. POEMS is the best broker for trading smaller markets like Indonesia and Malaysia. For major markets like USA, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore their fees are much higher than our pick, Interactive Brokers (IB).

The POEMS trading platforms are relatively basic and harder to use compared to Saxo & IB. They offer multiple accounts with a varying pricing and can sometimes charge monthly account maintenance and custody fees.

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What is POEMS?

POEMS is the online trading system offered by Phillip Securities, which is a subsidiary of Phillip Capital. Phillip Capital operates in 15 countries and serves over 1mm clients with more than YS$35Bn in Assets under Management (AUM). The are licensed by the MAS for Fund Management, Dealing in Capital Market Products and Custodial Services.

For customers in Singapore, they provide access to the following countries and products:

Countries and Products covered by POEMS

How is it different from other Brokers?

Widest Coverage for Asian Markets POEMS offers the widest coverage of Asian stock markets along with all the major markets like US, UK, Europe etc. For a few markets like South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines etc. they offer only offline trading facility but overall they have the best coverage of any broker in Singapore.

Best for the rest While Interactive Brokers (IB) is much cheaper than POEMS for the markets they cover, like US & Hong Kong, POEMS is usually the lowest cost broker if you wish to trade stocks in the markets where IB does not operate.

Complicated Pricing POEMS offers a number of different account types, each with a different pricing structure and features. They also offer a number of pricing tiers and promotional schemes that make it tough to understand the true cost over the medium term.

What are their fees like?

In our comparison we have largely focused on the pricing offered for the Cash Plus account, which has significantly lower commission rates. We used the pricing provided for the Premier Tier, which is applicable for customers with S$30K-250K on the platform.

In most cases we used their promotional pricing that was introduced in April 2021 and has now been extended to Dec 2022. We assume that this promotion is a result of the increased competition in the market from the likes of Tiger and moomoo and will be permanent.

We were unable to understand the purpose of the different account types although we spent a fair amount of time digging through the website and speaking to a very helpful POEMS employee. On the website, even POEMS recommends only the Cash Plus account for both active traders and non-active traders.

Overall, POEMS is usually the cheapest local broker but a lot more expensive than our pick, Interactive Brokers.

Their FX spreads are 40%-75% lower than other local brokers but are multiples higher than IB.

Unlike IB they also do no include the exchange and other regulatory fee in the quoted price. As a result, although their quoted rates are identical to IB in Singapore and Hong Kong, the all-in cost (excl. taxes, which should be identical for both) ends up being a lot higher via POEMS.

To confirm this, we purchased 4000 shares of Singtel on 5 platforms (including POEMS) at the same time, and sold them 3 days later, again at the same time. We received identical execution price on all 5 platforms on both legs.

This confirmed that while IB, Saxo and POEMS all advertise an identical 0.08% commission rate in Singapore, the actual cost to customers differs a fair bit.

In Singapore, for instance, IB includes the 0.04% SGX fees in the quoted 0.08% commission while POEMS charges it separately. As a result, despite an identical 0.08% quoted rate, POEMS commission is actually double that of IB.

In USA, while the promotional flat rate of US$2.88 sounds quite attractive, especially for larger orders, the higher FX spread charged by POEMS still makes it more expensive than IB.

Even excluding the FX spread impact, since IB charges only half a cent per share, your order needs to be for more than 576 shares for POEMS to be cheaper on commission (excluding FX spread impact).

POEMS also charges account maintenance and foreign share custody fee although they seem to usually waive it on a promotional basis. We did not include these fees in our calculations although we cannot rule out that you may need to pay these at some point.

POEMS does have more competitive pricing for some of the peripheral Asian markets like South Korea and Indonesia and it is our pick if you want to trade these markets. IB and other foreign brokers do not offer access to these markets and POEMS has much lower rates in most of these markets compared to the other local brokers.

Their minimum commission amount is not the lowest in Indonesia and Philippines, meaning they would be the cheapest in those markets only for larger trades (>S$5K and > S$9.7K respectively).

POEMS is our pick if you need to trade these markets from Singapore.

What tools and data do they have?

POEMS offers 3 trading platforms – the web based POEMS 2.0, the POEMS Mobile 2.0 and the POEMS Pro. POEMS also offers separate specialized platforms for CFDs and Forex but we did not test those at this time.

Overall we found the POEMS platforms to be adequate but not any different or better than most local peers. We would prefer IB (much larger feature set) and Saxo (easier to use) over POEMS.

We tested each of the platforms by trying to perform the 8 tasks in the table below.

None of the platforms supported completing all the tasks and surprisingly the additional functionality of the Pro platform was quite limited. POEMS Pro allows you to customize the layout of various modules on screen and link the Watchlists with other modules like Chart, Order Screen etc. There also some additional data that is available on Pro like Market Depth etc.

But otherwise we did not find POEMS Pro to be very different from the web based POEMS 2.0.

Research POEMS also offers access to some equity research and technical analysis tools. We found the research to be of limited use as the stock coverage was limited and there were very few updates. For US, there were a total of 5 research notes between Aug-Dec 2021. Singapore coverage was a little better with 38 notes between Aug-Dec 2021 but still far from comprehensive.

POEMS also offers access to an automated technical analysis tool called ChartWhiz which tries to flag trading signals. They also have tools to screen stocks and ETF using various filters.

Overall, though POEMS’ trading platforms, while adequate to get the job done, lag a fair bit against the best in class on features and have higher fee levels.

Customer Service POEMS appears to assign a team of Trading Representatives (TR) to all account holders. We were assigned a team of 3 TRs with a single telephone and email ID. We were able to reach out to them for all types of support requests as well as offline trade execution. We found them to be very responsive and helpful.

This is obviously a more friendly approach to customer service compared to trying to reach an anonymous customer service agent at a call center or trying to maneuver past an AI chatbot to reach a slow responding chat agent, as we experienced at the foreign brokers.

However given a choice between lower commissions and great customer service, most people should choose an online broker with lower commissions. This is because in our view, while you will pay the commissions year after year, you will not require customer support very frequently once you figure out your way around the system. And the basic operation of an online broking system is usually not very hard if you are comfortable online.

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