Pearler Review Australia (Updated 2022)
Should you invest with Pearler? Is it any good?
In this week’s video I share my honest thoughts of the low-cost online broker Pearler.
I cover the key features of the platform and everything you need to know before joining. Pearler Review Australia 2021.
🔵 Update March 2022: I’ve had to remove any affiliate or discount codes because ASIC has recently come out to say this constitutes financial advice – I can’t legally recommend a platform as I’m not a financial advisor, nor can I get any affiliate commission (not that it’s much money anyway). This goes for anyone basically online so keep that in mind when viewing other reviews. 🔵
Contents:
- What is Pearler?
- How does Pearler work?
- Is Pearler safe?
- Pearler fees
- Pearler auto invest feature
- Pearler app review
- Pearler minimum investment
- Pearler brokerage free ETFs – ETF securities, VanEck & eInvest
- Pearler community
- Is Pearler CHESS sponsored?
- Pearler founders
- Pearler ETF list
- Selfwealth vs pearler
- Pearler roadmap
- Pearler share trading review
- Pearler review Finder
- Pearler review Reddit
- Pearler broker review
- Achieving Financial independence with pearler
What is Pearler?
Pearler is an online broker for long-term Aussie investors, founded by 3 friends from Sydney in 2018 after they got fed up with only having two bad options to refer our friends to when they wanted to start investing – confusing trading platforms or expensive micro-investment apps.
Is Pearler safe?
Pearler is an Australian based company with ASIC license, CHESS sponsorship (more on this below) and cash held with a major Australian bank.
Pearler fees
Pearler charges $9.50 AUD per Australian trade to buy and sell, with brokerage free ETFs (more on this below) are free to buy as long as you hold them for over 1 year.
For US trades you pay $6.50 per trade with an FX rate of 35 basis points.
Pearler auto invest feature
Pearler’s auto invest feature is one of the more unique features for Pearler – it allows you to set up automatic investments. This is great because you take out the human emotion from investing – and as I always say – systems beat willpower. This means you keep investing no matter what the market is doing.
There are 3 ways to auto-invest through Pearler.
- I want to make regular deposits and invest them immediately – Put money into your account and it’ll be invested straight away
- I want to make regular deposits and invest these funds once they reach a certain value
- I want to make manual deposits and invest these funds once they reach a certain value
Beware with this feature as you can be susceptible to higher fees if you set up your auto-invest to invest smaller amounts with higher frequency. But overall, it’s a great feature.
Pearler app review
Pearler’s app originally wasn’t very good to be honest. It was a basic replica of their mobile site, but to their credit – the app has improved in leaps and bounds since. It’s fairly user friendly, not the best finance I’ve used, but it does the job and I’m confident it’ll keep getting better every month.
Pearler minimum investment
The minimum amount you can invest is $500, but there are rumours of Pearler releasing a micro-invest feature for those who want to invest less.
Pearler brokerage free ETFs – ETF securities, VanEck & eInvest
Pearler community
Pearler has a community tab which is full of member profiles which you can check out and follow if you want. You can see how other people choose to invest – although one thing I’d like to point out is you don’t know whether these people are bad investors or not, so you probably don’t want to just copy someone’s portfolio.
Also – they don’t mention what they’re invested in outside of Pearler so it may show a skewed or partial picture of what they’re invested in.
Is Pearler CHESS sponsored?
Yes Pearler is CHESS sponsored, so the shares are owned in your name. If anything were to happen to Pearler and it went under, you would still have ownership of your shares.
Pearler founders
Founded by Nick Nicolaides, Hayden Smith, and Kurt Walkom, Sydney fintech startup Pearler aims to turn successful savers into confident investors.
Pearler ETF list
The full list of ETFs on the Pearler website are found here.
If you want to see the Brokerage-free ETFs, just filter them on the right column by selecting Brokerage Type > No Buy Brokerage
Selfwealth vs Pearler
Pearler roadmap
Pearler share trading review
Pearler review Finder
Pearler review Reddit
Pearler broker review
Achieving Financial independence with Pearler
Transcription:
G’day there, Ray Corcoran here. In this week’s video, I’m going to be going over the investment platform, Pearler. I’m going to be going over all the pros, all the cons, all the main features of the platform, who it’s for, and all that sort of stuff. And if you enjoy the video, got a lot of value out of it, please give it a like. It does help it push out to more people.
So Pearler’s been around for a couple of years now, and they’ve really, really exploded in popularity in the last year or so. And part of that has been because they’ve been very, very community focused. So they’ve been very active and involved in the Financial Independence, Retire Early, or FIRE community. And very, very involved in the blogs and Instagram pages and all that sort of… It’s a very grass roots marketing approach that they’ve had and it’s proven to be very, very successful. So if you’re someone that’s looking to buy Australian stocks, US stocks now, as well as ETFs and LICs, Pearler is a really, really good low-cost online brokerage that you can basically buy those things through. And by the way, if you didn’t know what Pearler means, in Aussie slang it’s basically something that’s very, very impressive or very, very good.
And at a high level, their whole investing ethos, if you will, is all around buy-and-hold boring investing. So they’re all about more so towards ETFs and that sort of stuff. They’re more skewed to that side of things, but really just buy and hold and rinse and repeat for the long-term. So much like Stockspot, they do reinforce positive investing habits with their users. They’re not encouraging them to buy and hold and do rapid trades all the time. And they’ve got a low minimum buy amount of a hundred dollars for most shares, as well as a no minimum sell amount. And for the brokerage-free ETFs, which we’ll get into in a second, they have a minimum buy amount of 500 bucks. So it’s very, very accessible for people if they want to buy smaller amounts.
So one of the most unique features about Pearler, that a lot of other places do not have, is the auto-invest feature. So what this basically allows you to do is to set up some automatic investment options, as the name suggests. And it means that you basically take the human decision making out of investing. And for me, I really, really like that. I think it’s a very, very powerful tool.
One thing that I learned years ago was that systems beat willpower, and any time where you can take the human… Some days you might feel like investing, other days you may not feel like investing, but when you have auto-invest, you take that human element out of it. And it means that you can keep investing consistently and you’re not investing based on what you think the market’s doing or where you think it’s going to go. It’s a very, very positive thing. And it’s really, really in line with their boring buy-and-hold approach. And it just means that you can dollar-cost average and just keep buying on a regular basis regardless of what the market is doing. And long-term you’ll end up doing pretty well, usually.
So the first option with the auto-invest feature is, I want to make regular deposits and then invest them immediately. So you just want to keep putting money in on a regular basis, and as soon as that money hits your account, it gets invested to whatever portfolio allocation that you’ve set up.
The second option is you want to make regular deposits, but you only want it to invest once you’ve hit a certain amount. So you might say, instead of putting in $500 every week and investing $500 every week, you can choose to put $500 in and only actually make the investment once I get to, say, $2,000. And often, people will use this when they don’t particularly want to pay as much in fees. And they’re happy to wait until they’ve got a decent enough chunk and then invest.
And the third option is you want to make manual deposits, basically whenever you choose. So it could be just sporadically, and then you want it to invest that money once it reaches a certain amount, similar to the previous option. But I think for a lot of people almost regardless of which option you take, I think creating the habit where your investing is automated, is a fantastic thing.
The second thing to highlight is that Pearler is CHESS sponsored. So basically what that means is if you buy shares through them, all the shares are owned in your name. And this is different to something like, say the Superhero platform, where it is a custodial model, a custodian model. Where basically, they take everybody’s investments, pool them all together, and it allows them to offer lower fees, but the shares aren’t owned in your name, which is a slight difference. And for me personally, I generally like to invest with platforms that do have CHESS sponsorship so that I do own the assets in my name. Should anything happen to the broker, there’s not going to be any funny business. And it’s not to say that custodian model is a terrible thing, but there is a small amount of extra risk, and for me personally, I’m not really interested in that.
So in terms of Pearler’s fees, it’s very, very affordable. So for buying and selling Australian shares, you pay $9.50 for Australian shares to buy and $9.50 to sell. For US shares, which has recently been added to the platform, you pay $6.50 to buy and $6.50 to sell, and there’s no maintenance, inactivity or transfer fees along with that, which is good. And another important thing that Pearler does is they actually have brokerage-free ETFs. So they have 47, at the time of filming, 47 brokerage-free ETFs. And they are with three providers, VanEck, eInvest and ETF Securities. They really, really want to encourage long-term investing and not rapid trading, buying and selling, and all that craziness. So they actually, for those particular ETFs, they’ve done a deal with them so that you don’t pay brokerage. And the only catch is that you need to hold it for at least 12 months, which is probably a good idea anyway.
And in terms of a cost comparison, compared to other platforms, Pearler actually has a summary on their website in terms of the different pricing comparisons, but just please note that a lot of these platforms change their fees super, super often. And it’s a very, very competitive space, so all the fees are always changing and typically reducing over time. And there’s lots of different specials. I know Stake has got some discounted trades, or they’ve got all these different deals coming out at the moment. So it’s a very competitive space. So I wouldn’t be surprised over the next few months that all these prices change quite a bit.
The next feature that Pearler has, which a lot of other platform don’t have, is the community investing section. So basically what this has is a bunch of finfluencers, as they say, a bunch of other people that are just members on the platform and they share what their portfolios are in terms of what’s their investing split. A lot of people like this section. And I guess my only disclaimer here would be to trade with care. When you look at some of these portfolios, to be blunt, some of these people could be idiots. And if my profile’s there, I’m definitely at least one idiot within there. And I guess, at the end of the day, people might have, as I do, I’ve got 450K in ETFs with Stockspot and I have already got exposure to certain ETFs there. So you wouldn’t know that unless I told you. So if you look at some of these other profiles, just take it with a grain of salt.
Another common question people have is, well, how do I transfer my stocks across to Pearler? So it’s actually quite easy. You’ve just got to go to the auto-invest section and then click the transfer now button. And then once you go there, you’ll basically have to fill out a form and basically tell Pearler, basically, what are you trying to transfer across, what kind of stocks, and all that sort of stuff. Please note, it’s not for US stocks at this time, but that may be added in the future. And also, if you are waiting on dividends for any of your stocks, wait till they get paid out before transferring it across.
Another feature a lot of people will like is that they have… Pearler has an integration with Sharesight. And Sharesight, if you don’t already know, is a platform where you can keep track of all your investments and trades all in the one spot. And it’s very, very handy at tax time if you’ve bought this and then sold that, and just keeping track of that is a bit of a nightmare sometimes. And the good thing is, Pearler integrates completely with Sharesight. So it just makes it a little bit easier at tax time and just keeping tabs on what you’re doing.
So in terms of downsides, overall, it’s a great platform, but no platform is perfect and everything has little niggling things that may get annoying. So the first potential downside would be that they do have those great free ETFs. The only problem is, they don’t have free ETFs with the three biggest providers of ETFs, and the most popular ETFs, which would be from people like Vanguard, iShares, and BetaShares. So it’s just something to keep in mind. I would love to see that added in future, Pearler, if you’re watching. But I’ve heard also through the grapevine that people like Vanguard aren’t very keen on giving big discounts or doing deals of that nature, so that’s something to keep in mind.
The second downside is the mobile app. It has been a little bit clunky, but to Pearler’s credit it actually is a lot better than it used to be. And one thing I will definitely give them credit for is how rapidly they’re improving stuff. So anything that’s annoying now probably won’t be annoying in a few weeks or a few months. And they seem very, very keen to continuously improve their product, which I really, really like. The third downside is you can’t buy fractional shares. So for those that want to buy because they’re CHESS sponsored, if you’re looking to buy half of one share, for example, a share might be $200 and you’ve only got a hundred dollars that you want to spend, hypothetically, you would not be able to do that, compared to something like Sharesies where you can buy fractional shares on the ASX.
And the fourth potential downside is the auto-invest feature, if you don’t know what you’re doing, could mean that you end up paying a lot more brokerage than you need to. So say if someone set up auto-invest and they made the auto investment for lots of small amounts and lots of frequent trades to keep buying in much smaller amounts, that could add up to the point where you actually do end up paying a lot of fees. They have added a investment frequency calculator to their website, which you can see, there’s a link in the footer on their website. So you can plug in your numbers and say, I want to invest a thousand dollars a month, or something like that, they can basically help you calculate what would be the most cost-effective way for you to do that.
In terms of how to set up your account, you go to their website, you will fill out your personal details, then you’ll need to fund your account. So transfer some money in, they’ve recently added instant transfers so you can send the money across instantly, which is awesome. Once you’ve funded it, then you can actually go buy some shares. You can also choose to set up auto-invest at this point, if you would like to. And they have template portfolios as well. So you can check those out on their website if you want some starter ideas around the portfolio too. And then you’re basically good to go and you’ll be able to buy with relatively low cost. You’ll be able to buy ETFs, LICs, US shares and Australian shares through Pearler for a relatively low cost.
So if you’re looking for a low cost online brokerage, I think Pearler is a great option for you to check out. If you have any questions, please let me know below. And yeah, I’ll see you in the next video.