Risk Allocation is a key principle for successful investment portfolio management. Traditionally, that has meant that the investment portfolio is managed across Direct Equity, Mutual Funds (Equity & Debt), Bullion (Gold & Silver. Having said that, our generation is seeing an unprecedented value being created by technology. Even as India establishes itself as a technology superpower a lot of that might historically have been dominated by IT services. Although this might be great, it is a relatively low margin business unlike a high margin software only technology play.
It is no secret that companies like Netflix, Amazon are truly global in nature and due to the nature of their global footprint, not only do they enjoy less business risk due to diversification, they also continue to deliver great shareholder returns. How much you ask?
How To Invest In Companies Like Netflix & Amazon From India?
For the longest time, even as we had the aspiration and desire to invest in US equities like Netflix & Amazon, there really wasn’t an easy way to add that exposure to our investment portfolio unless we had relatives/friends in US who could help us open a US brokerage account if at all.
This meant that despite a healthy risk allocation adjusted for both safety and returns, Indians were still heavily reliant on Indian economy alone when it came to portfolio exposure.
However, this is the beautiful thing with technology & the internet. People with the resolve to democratize global investing don’t take NO for an answer.
Enter Stockal – A Platform for Indians to Invest In global equity markets
I came across Stockal as I was increasingly looking for ways to make my investment portfolio to have a little more global market exposure. Funny enough, I came across Stockal on Twitter first and then decided to check out what they do.
To my pleasant surprise, Stockal’s core promise is to enable anyone in India (and more countries) to participate in the global investment market.
Forget seamless, just the ability to access global markets sitting out of India is what I wanted. I was ready to go through hoops if at all but Stockal truly makes it simple.
Flexible Subscription Plans
Make no mistake, enabling access to global equity market investing is no easy task. Just solving for regulatory compliance can be a nightmare leave aside building a seamless trading platform for investors of all kind.
To that effect, fully knowing that global equity investing could be a new endeavour for a lot of Indians what I really like about Stockal is how they have carefully thought through flexible plans to ensure that investors of all kinds can get a taste of global markets based on their appetite
- On the fence and not ready to commit regular investments yet, the basic plan allows for a simple cost per trade option that allows you to make those first few trades
- For investors who have a slightly more regular investing pattern like me, The Silver plan allows for reducing the per trade cost by paying a yearly subscription fee
Fractional Trading – Truly Democratizing Access
Even with flexible subscription plans, one of the big challenges with global investing is the barrier to entry with respect to the price of some of these stocks.
Take for instance, Amazon which currently is trading at $3,000 or even Netflix which is trading at sub $470. As much I am bought in the long term potential of these two stocks, shelling out almost ~2L INR for a single share of Amazon can be daunting.
Enter Fractional Trading by Stockal! Stockal has clearly taken strides to ensure that this barrier to entry is also reduced by allowing investors on the platform to take fractional positions. Essentially, even if you have only say $500 to invest you could buy a fractional position in Amazon.
This truly enables investors of all sizes of investment portfolios to add more global diversification to their portfolio allocation
Investing without Education is A Gamble
The entire reason for starting this blog for me was to educate & journal my learnings as I started building my personal finance plan a few years back.
Financial markets are filled with complicated jargons and too many easy looking ‘get rich fast’ schemes like stock tips etc. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as Get Rich schemes and educating oneself before making the leap is key
This is why I like that Stockal has taken this upon themselves that even as they provide access to global markets to investors, they have the bases covered by making a concentrated effort in providing financial literacy to everyone before and as people start investing in global stock markets.
The Stockal Blog section has some amazing resources ranging from basics to advanced as well as regular commentary on what is happening in global markets. For example, if you are a new investor start with their Investing 101 section or if you are an advanced trader, head over to their Technical Analysis section for in-depth informative content
If you have always wondered how to invest in amazon from India you can now truly act on it with Stockal. What are you waiting for, sign up for Stockal now and kick start your truly global investment portfolio
PS: My only pet peeve right now is that the process for depositing money in the account is not completely paperless but I understand that it is more a roadblock from Indian banks than Stockal. I also understand that Stockal is working with Banks to try and digitize the deposit process completely soon.
