Top brokers Aussies use to invest in stocks and ETFs

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With the ever-growing number of stockbrokers available to Australian investors, you may be left wondering which is the best broker to suit your needs. Your priorities will differ depending on your investing strategy; for example, are you a frequent trader or more of a long-term investor? And do you prefer stocks, ETFs or a mix of both? With some of these questions in mind, we take a look at the most popular brokers among Sharesight users in FY24/25.

Most popular brokers for Australian investors

To determine the most popular Australian broker, we looked at the brokers with the highest number of trades amongst our user base. In this case, CMC was the clear winner, followed by Pearler and CommSec.

CMC Invest

What makes CMC such a popular choice for Australian investors? The broker’s expansive global market support – including $0 brokerage fees for international trades in select markets – is likely one reason why CMC has been so popular with Australian investors. CMC is also connected to the Sharesight API, allowing CMC customers to effortlessly track their trades in Sharesight.

"We’re committed to continuously improving our user experience and adapting to our customers' changing needs,” says Andy Rogers, Director of Stockbroking at CMC Markets.

“The API lets us seamlessly integrate Sharesight’s features into our platform, allowing us to quickly enhance the overall customer experience."

This is the fourth year in a row that CMC has topped the rankings as Australian Sharesight users’ preferred broker.

Pearler

Pearler has also achieved second place for the second year in a row. Much like CMC, Pearler has integrated with the Sharesight API, allowing investors to measure their performance with ease.

“At Pearler, we’ve built a community around sensible – even boring – long-term investing over speculative trading,” says Pearler CEO and Co-founder Nick Nicolaides.

“We’ve always believed that investing should be as stress-free as possible, and Sharesight’s portfolio management tools make this easier than ever.”

CommSec

Coming very close behind Pearler, CommSec also remained a clear favourite for Australian investors in FY24/25. This can likely be attributed to CommSec’s long history as a leading Australian broker, with the company celebrating 30 years in July this year.

"Over the past 30 years, CommSec has played a critical role in shaping the way Australians invest,” says CommSec’s Executive General Manger, James Fowle.

“Whether a first-time investor or seasoned portfolio builder, we’ve always pathed new ground to make investing more accessible to all Australians through innovation and education. Trust is key to who we are and I’m thankful to the millions of Australians who continue to trust us to grow their wealth.”

It’s also easy for Australian investors to get their CommSec trades into Sharesight, with support for CommSec CSV files (spreadsheets) to import historical trading data into Sharesight, plus the ability to automatically forward trade confirmation emails to Sharesight to capture any ongoing trades.

Selfwealth

Ranked fourth this year, Australian investors likely gravitated to Selfwealth due to its low-cost flat-fee trading and access to US markets. Much like CommSec, Selfwealth also supports CSV files and trade confirmation forwarding, making it easy for investors to keep their trading information up to date in their Sharesight portfolio.

“Selfwealth now supports more than 130,000 Australian investors who value our flat-free pricing, intuitive and easy-to-use platform, personalised service and support and access to international markets,” says Brendan Mutton, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Selfwealth.

“Now part of Syfe, we’ve entered an exciting new chapter, bringing together our trusted platform and their global expertise to unlock more innovation, broader opportunities, and long-term value for Australian investors. We’re proud to be recognised in Sharesight’s rankings, as it reaffirms our unwavering commitment to supporting investors and evolving with their needs.”

Top Australian brokers for ETF investors

With ETFs continuing to grow in popularity, especially among new investors or those seeking diversification, we also felt it was important to highlight the most popular brokers for ETF investing. As shown in the chart below, CMC came out on top, followed by Pearler, with CommSec in third place. Notably, Vanguard Personal Investor (VPI) has entered the rankings for the first time, taking 6th place ahead of nabtrade.

With CMC being Sharesight users’ preferred broker overall, it makes sense that the broker also topped the list of investors’ favourite brokers for investing in ETFs.

It’s also not hard to see why Pearler came second, considering the platform’s focus on long-term investing, with ETF investing being a key strategy for many long-term investors.

“ETF investing has always been the foundation of the Pearler community’s investing habits,” says Nicolaides.

“In fact, the 10 most popular investments within Pearler are all ETFs. To us, this indicates that more and more Australians are choosing to tune out the noise, buy the market, and passively invest for the long term.”

Most popular ETFs for Australian investors

As can be seen from the chart below, the most popular ETF amongst our Australian user base was Vanguard’s Australian Shares Index ETF (ASX: VAS), followed by the MSCI Index International Shares ETF (ASX: VGS) and iShares’ Core S&P 500 ETF (ASX: IVV). These rankings remain unchanged from the previous year, however the gap between VAS and the rest of the ETFs has shrunk quite significantly.

That being said, it’s easy to see why VAS remains a popular choice for Australian investors, as this ETF seeks to track the return of the ASX 300, making it a good option for investors looking to diversify and balance their portfolio while still focusing on Australian shares.

VGS also tends to be a popular ETF for Australian investors looking to diversify their portfolio, as it provides exposure to many of the world’s biggest companies listed in developed countries, and is exposed to fluctuating values of foreign currencies.

At the same time, IVV tends to be popular with investors seeking exposure to US markets, as this ETF seeks to track the performance of the 500 largest US stocks by market capitalisation.

Track all your investments in one place with Sharesight

Thousands of investors like you are already using Sharesight to track the performance of their ASX investments along with the rest of their global assets.

If you’re not already using Sharesight, what are you waiting for? Sign up and:

• Track all of your investments in one place, including global stocks, ETFs, mutual/managed funds, property and even cryptocurrency
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• Run powerful reports built for investors, including performance, portfolio diversity, contribution analysis, future income, exposure, drawdown risk, multi-period and multi-currency valuation
• See the true picture of your investment performance, including the impact of brokerage fees, dividends, and capital gains with Sharesight’s annualised performance calculation methodology

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FURTHER READING

• Why Sharesight is the best multi-asset portfolio tracker
• How to track exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
• See what’s inside your ETFs with Sharesight’s exposure report