Review: Saxo Markets

The Bottom Line

Saxo Markets is a Danish online broker regulated in 15 countries, including Singapore and UK.

Their platforms are the most modern and user friendly of all the brokers we tested. They offer three trading platforms with different levels of sophistication. SaxoInvestor & SaxoTraderGO are web based while the SaxoTraderPro is the desktop based professional grade app. Surprisingly there is no dedicated mobile app.

The all-in trading cost on Saxo’s platforms is in the middle of the range available to Singapore based investors. They launched a unique subscription based pricing model in late 2021. In our calculations, the paid subscription tiers do not make their pricing more affordable compared to others.

Saxo Markets allows you to trade US, Europe, UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia but does not provide access to many Asian markets like Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand etc.

What is Saxo Markets?

Saxo Markets is a Danish broker offering access to 85 exchanges in 26 countries. Saxo Markets is a subsidiary of Saxo Bank, which in turn is owned by the Chinese automotive group Geely (50.89%), Saxo Bank’s Founder Kim Fournais (27.53%) and Sampo Plc (19.43%). Saxo Markets is regulated in 15 countries including Denmark, UK, Australia and Singapore.

They have 800K clients in 120 countries with more than US$95bn in client assets under custody. They made a profit of US$113mm in 2020. For customers in Singapore, they provide access to the following countries and products:

Countries and Products covered by Saxo Markets

How is it different from other Brokers?

Modern & User Friendly Interface Saxo Markets stood out for the user-friendliness and modern interface of their trading platforms. They offer 3 platforms: SaxoInvestor (basic) and SaxoTraderGO (full featured) are web-based and relatively simplified while SaxoTraderPro is desktop-based, professional grade platform. The user experience on all 3 platforms was best-in-class. Common tasks were easy to accomplish, pre-set defaults were often exactly what we wanted and changes were simple to make.

Subscription Based Pricing Saxo is unique in offering tiered subscription plans ranging from the free Bronze tier to the S$145 a month Diamond tier. The more expensive tiers offer progressively lower commission rates and per trade minimums. They also offer commission credit equal to the monthly subscription amount. You also need to be a Gold (S$15/month) or higher tier subscriber to get access to their full featured platform, SaxoTraderPro. The paid tiers also come with more real time price data included and better support options.

What are their fees like?

On our calculations Saxo was consistently in the middle of the pack on pricing in all major markets. We used the pricing of the free Bronze tier in our calculations. While the commission rates on the higher tiers are lower, we did not use those in our comparison for a few reasons.

First, the biggest cost element for trading in countries outside Singapore is Saxo’s high FX conversion spread of 0.30% across currencies. That remains constant across the tiers meaning using the better pricing from the higher tiers will not impact Saxo’s position meaningfully.

Second, in Singapore only the Platinum and Diamond plans have commission rates equal to or better than our pick for the best online broker, Interactive Brokers (IB). But those plans cost S$45 and S$145 a month respectively and make sense only for very active traders. For S$45, on IB, you could perform 18 smaller trades or nearly S$110K in larger trades a month for that amount.

If you are trading more than 18 times a month or more than S$110K a month, you probably also want to trade markets other than Singapore, where that FX conversion fee kicks in.

Saxo charges the exchange and regulatory fees over and above their advertised commission rates, unlike our pick, IB. 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 Saxo Markets.

To confirm this, we purchased 4000 shares of Singtel on 5 platforms (including Saxo Markets) 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. The analysis of the actual commissions paid, in the table below, clearly shows that Saxo (and Tiger & POEMS) have double the commission rate of IB.

Saxo was also unusual among the foreign brokers in charging a custody fee of 0.12% for most subscription tiers. For the free tier, opting into securities lending lowered this to 0.06% while for higher tiers that gets the custody fee waived. In our comparison we assumed that the Bronze tier customer opts-in to securities lending and used a custody fee of 0.06%. This is indicated by the dark blue portion in the comparison graphs above.

It is worth noting that while enabling securities lending is low risk, it is not riskless. Also Saxo claims that you receive any extra revenue generated by the loaned out securities but it was not clear to us how “extra” would be calculated.

What tools and data do they have?

Saxo’s trading platforms have the most modern look & feel and were quite intuitive to set up and customize. Getting through our test tasks required the least effort of any broker on their platforms as a result and we were able to accomplish every single task on all 3 platforms.

All the features are logically arranged in various menus and were easy to locate. The default settings are often exactly what you want.

We loved that the trade ticket screen has the option of displaying the total cost of trade and the applicable commission rates etc. There is also an option to launch a grid of upto 4×4 charts with a single click. You can evaluate the performance of you portfolio over any custom date range with a couple of clicks. There are many such nice touches sprinkled all over the system that make it the best in class when it comes to ease of use.

However, while the platforms aren’t missing any major feature, we also did not find any exceptional feature or tools that would make the platform really stand out.

Research Saxo has a dedicated Research section on its platforms and on the website, where they highlight their team of experts. However, we found the articles and videos available to the retail investors to be quite basic.

Customer Service With the new subscription tiers, priority phone support is now only available to Platinum and Diamond customers. However we tested both the digital and phone support under the old pricing scheme. The chat support defaults to their AI bot and it takes a bit of effort to get past it to a live human. We found the chat support to be adequate for most questions although on a couple of occasions they directed us to other channels – once to open a ticket on the platform and once to call the local office. The ticket was resolved in a couple of days on the platform and the call to the local office solved our problem but only after a 8min wait on hold.

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