How to put buy and sell orders in the Philippine Stock Market with an Online Stockbroker
Opening your online trading account to start investing in the Philippine stock market requires a minimal value. Many online brokers allow you to start with as low as 5k pesos. In fact, if you have an existing bank account with BPI and Metrobank, you can open a trading account even with zero capital.But opening a trading account under your chosen stockbroker is just the first step towards becoming an investor. For you to buy your first share of your first company, you should know how to place an order and in so doing, make your voice in the stock market world. It’s actually very easy. If you’re at ease with reading this blog or facebooking, it will be that simple.
Below discussion tackles how to place your orders in the stock market through an online stockbroker. Unlike having a traditional broker where you communicate your order through a phone call or text message, online trading allows you to place your order directly through the internet. That means you can practically put you order from anywhere in the world, as long as you have any device (PC, laptop, mobile phone, etc) that can connect to the world-wide-web.
Here are the prerequisites:
1. You should already have your chosen stockbroker.
2. You should already have your log-on details.
Once you have above, log-on to your stockbroker’s site. Just look around the site and you can easily spot where you can put your orders.
PLACING YOUR ORDERS
Below image depicts a typical online window when making an order entry (with BPI Trade online stockbroker):
Here you will see the important data necessary for placing any kind of order. These details include the side or type of order, the stock symbol or code, the volume or the number of shares or stocks you want to buy or sell, and finally your price. If you notice, it’s nothing different from buying your goods in the market.
Some brokers, to add more options to their clients require even more data like the type of your order (limit versus market) and the validity and duration/timing of the order (‘Day’ versus ‘GTW’ versus ‘GTC’ versus ‘ATC’ versus ‘GTD’). See other online order entry windows below for COL Financial and Philstocks.ph. We’ll tackle these functionalities and how we can take advantage of them in future blog. While these functionalities can be helpful in some of your strategies for a more active trading or strategic investing, the first four data mentioned constitutes the very basic order.
Obviously, you can’t just put any value you want in any of these data. There are certain restrictions you need to follow when filling them out to make a valid order and finally buy your first stock.
1. First is the stock symbol. You just can’t buy from a store something that doesn’t exist. Be familiar with the codes or symbols of your favorite stocks. Through time you can commit those in your memory. In any case, your online broker should have a complete list of all companies with their stock codes enlisted in the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE).
2. Second is the volume. Volume only means number of shares or stocks. This is where the board lot table matters, shown below. All buying and selling orders are subject to a minimum number of shares as prescribed by the board lot table instituted by the PSE. You can read this to learn more about the board lot: board lot table in Philippine stock exchange.
Price | Minimum Fluctuations (Tick Size) | Lot Size |
0.0001 - 0.0099 | 0.0001 | 1,000,000 |
0.0100 - 0.0490 | 0.0010 | 100,000 |
0.0500 - 0.2490 | 0.0010 | 10,000 |
0.2500 - 0.4950 | 0.0050 | 10,000 |
0.5000 - 4.9900 | 0.0100 | 1,000 |
5.0000 - 9.9900 | 0.0100 | 100 |
10.0000 - 19.9800 | 0.0200 | 100 |
20.0000 - 49.9500 | 0.0500 | 100 |
50.0000 - 99.9500 | 0.0500 | 10 |
100.0000 - 199.9000 | 0.1000 | 10 |
200.0000 - 499.8000 | 0.2000 | 10 |
500.0000 - 999.5000 | 0.5000 | 10 |
1,000.0000 - 1,999.0000 | 1.0000 | 5 |
2,000.0000 - 4,998.0000 | 2.0000 | 5 |
5,000.0000 - up | 5.0000 | 5 |
3. Third is the price. This price can either be a ‘bid price’ if you are buying, or an ‘ask price’ if you are the one selling. At any single trading day, you can put a bid/ask price within the range 0.5CP (ceiling) - 1.5CP(floor), where CP is the closing price of the stock the previous trading day. You can read this for various prices you encounter in a stock market.
Note that with online trading, the volume and price you use, plus all the associated commission and transaction fees, should not charge you more than your available trading balance in your trading account. If that’s the case, the system will tell you that you don’t have enough balance for your order, and you need to adjust either your price or volume (or both) until the total cost is equal to or below your available trading fund, to make your order posted in the market. You can read this for the trading costs in the Philippine stock market.
Once posted, that order can either be fully matched, partially matched or remain unmatched, depending on the price and volume of your active order. If it’s carried out (fully or partially matched), you will be given a confirmation invoice by your stockbroker showing the details of the transaction, either via your personal email or in their site, within the next 24 hours or so.
You can read this stock market order matching process to check if you want to know how to position your order with the rest and make your strategy accordingly.
Be Careful
As a last note, you better be careful when making your orders online. The convenience of making online orders can also backfire you if you’re reckless.
Remember that the default order type is buy. Several times it happened to me that I was supposed to sell my shares for a profit but because of some excitement (or ignorance) I forgot to tick the sell button. I was only caught in surprise when I checked my portfolio and saw my number of shares increased instead. Really a tragedy to me. HAHA
If you remember the times when CPG (still PWR that time) and TDY was reaching all time high, that was it. I guess that’s one of the caution in swift trading. Until now, I still have TDY shares because of that. HAHA. Konti lang naman.
So there. Make your orders now (attentively)!
Have fun investing!
PS: Join our facebook group Investing in the Philippines Stock Market - Tips & Tricks and invest in yourself by accessing our vault of helpful ebooks.
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PS3: Lastly, please include me in your prayers, I have lots of plans running in my mind now to serve you better in the future, and I think I need some clear guidance from above. Clarity is power! HAHA
