Becoming my own broker

By CHRIS BARTON

Using the web over the past few weeks to sell shares shows just how much the internet changes everything and just how much it does not.

I had never sold shares before. I started at the Access Brokerage site ready and eager to sign up. But my online adventure quickly came to grinding halt.

I needed a newer shareholder number and a Faster Identification Number - a FIN, which is the share equivalent of a PIN.

For security reasons you can't get these over the web. It needed a phone call to share registry Computershare to have them sent to my home the next day.

Back at Access (chosen because I had heard it was one of the cheapest) I filled in the online form and, a few hours later, received email notification of my login and password.

I thought long and hard about what selling price to put on my 439 UnitedNetworks shares - resigned to the certainty that the price would go up the moment I sold.

I was also in a hurry because my car was rapidly dying and I needed the cash. So $9.15 - clearing me $3987 after $30 brokerage fees - seemed like a good number. There were also clear signs in the online chart that the price was right - the 20-day and 5-day moving averages were intersecting while the moon was rising in Aquarius.

Then followed an agonising two weeks. The price hovered around $9.10 as I nervously logged on at various times each day to check market depth.

How I laughed at the optimistic fellows asking $9.50 and even $10. But mostly the process was just a little more interesting than watching paint dry.

Finally, my sell price met another's bid and I was elated by my profit on shares given to me for nix by Power New Zealand in 1994. But as predicted, the price continued to climb after my sale, and then Vector announced its $9.90 takeover. When I last looked, the shares were at $9.82, which would have given me another $324. "That's life," I said as I quietly wept.

But overall, my online experience was great. Everything worked smoothly. There was no need to call brokers and fill in pieces of paper, and I could do everything at my convenience. The net really had made a difference.

Interestingly, all confirmations, even if emailed, were also posted out. That's because of one of the great unsolved issues with the net - authenticating transactions.

While it would have been nice to be able to immediately transfer the proceeds to my bank account online, I felt strangely reassured by the delayed processes and the paper-based confirmations.

Looking to the future, however, one would hope for a more "real time" experience - so that when shares trade, the transaction goes straight through to the exchange with immediate electronic notification. Our exchange has this capability but for some reason has never implemented the feature.

Ideally, you would also like immediate online transfers between your trading account and your other bank accounts - which is partly possible with some of the other online brokers.

But for that to happen, you'd want a much more secure means of authentication. Not to mention a significant underlying change in the banking industry allowing instant and automated cross-border online money transfers and the accompanying interest and exchange-rate calculations.

For some reason known only to banks, the transfer from my trading account to my savings account had to be done overnight.

Maybe I've watched too many episodes of The Street but I wish online share sites were more exciting. Sites such as Stockwatch, for its easy-access personal portfolios; and Sharechat for its news depth and forums, are steps in the right direction.

Maybe so little happens on our exchange that a real-time, automatically refreshed screen with share-price changes by the second, dynamic graphs and a soundtrack to fit the mood would not help. But the local sites I looked at, not to mention the sorry-looking NZSE (www.nzse.co.nz), could do with an injection of vitality.

* Email Chris Barton

Access Brokerage

Direct Broking

DFMainland

ASB Securities

Stockwatch

Sharechat