South Africa is an emerging market, and with that comes the risk of instability. The political climate has not been stable in South Africa. It’s good to have offshore assets to diversify your portfolio. This is a guide on how to buy offshore shares from South Africa.
Register with a broker
The first thing you have to do is to register with a broker. A broker gives you a platform to buy shares from offshore companies. There are a lot of brokers in South Africa. I personally recommend using EasyEquities if you are a beginner, it is cheap and very easy to use. Most brokers charge an arm and a leg in fees but EasyEquities doesn’t charge even close to what other brokers charge.
The target market for EasyEquities is beginners who want to invest in the stock market without paying a lot. You can even get started with R100, here is a guide on how to open an EasyEquities account.
You will automatically get a demo account with $10k, you can use it to practice buying shares from offshore companies. Then deposit money into your real account in order to buy real shares.
From your EasyEquities dashboard, do the following:
- Tap on “invest”.
- Choose your investment account; which should be the USD account.
- Search for the company you want to invest in.
- Tap on the company and click on “buy”.
- Enter the amount of money you want to buy with.
You are not only limited to investing in individual companies, you can also invest in ETFs and invest in the index instead. To find an ETF, simply click on “ETFs” at the top, there are lots of them, I personally regularly invest in Vanguard.
Conclusion
That’s how to buy offshore shares from South Africa. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.
