When I first looked into trying my hand in the Philippine stock market and opening an online brokerage account, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of online platforms available to retail investors. There are 31 online brokers on this list on the Philippine Stock Exchange website. Quite a few are backed by major Philippine banks like BDO, BPI, and Metrobank, while many more are independent brokerage houses. At least nine of them run on the PSETradex platform provided by the Philippine Stock Exchange itself.

Before this, my only experience with trading stocks was in the U.S. with brokers like Ally, Robinhood, and now Charles Schwab. Recent competition among U.S. online brokers have driven down the cost of trading commissions to the bare minimum: $0. Charles Schwab charged $29.95 per trade in 1998. Before dropping the rate to $0 in October 2019, it was charging $4.95 per trade.