Trading South Korea Equity in Canada

[rb]

Does anyone know of any brokers or any way in which you could buy South Korean Stocks in Canada?

 

The closed I've found is IB which only offers single stock futures on a very limited number of names.

 

Any ideas will be much appreciated.

 

Thanks

[no_free_lunch]

I have been thinking about South Korea as well.  You are specifically saying that you want to buy stocks which is understandable but have you considered an ETF?

[rb]

I'm so interested in ETFs (that would be easy) cause I don't like Korean baskets. Individual names is what I'm looking for.

[innerscorecard]

I think you more or less follow this process, but with different brokerages, no?:

 

http://www.samsung.com/us/aboutsamsung/investor_relations/stock_info/howtobuysecstocks/

[rb]

I guess one way would be to open up an account in Korea.

[simplefocus]

Fidelity allows you to trade Korean stocks.

[rb]

Fidelity doesn't have a brokerage in Canada

[rich379]

I have an acount with Boom Securities in Hong Kong. They deal in most Asian stocks including South Korea. They open sccount s for non resident foreigners.

 

I opened an account with them to buy a particular stock in Malaysia. Unfortunately they told me afterwards that trading in Malaysia is not possible with joint accounts (only account held by single individual).

 

I still have a funded account with them but have yet to complete a single trade  (the other stock I was interested in is very thinly traded on the Nagoya Stock Exchange and price keeps going up...).

 

I may buy some Posco soon to deploy the cash. I note that the Korean stock is a bit cheaper than the US traded ADR. Probably not once the extra forex (unknown) and brokerage costs (0.5%) are taken into account though.

 

Rich

[TwoCitiesCapital]

Samsung and Posco both have ADRs that trade in the U.S. The Samsung one is incredibly illiquid though. Hyundai preferred shares trade as a GDR in USD on the LSE. So if you can get a broker that has access to u.s. and london exchanges, you can have your pick of those three. I've been finding it difficult to get access to much more than that. I think someone here said Schwabb would work at one point, but it's like a $50 fee to execute the trade.

[bizaro86]

I found the Hyundai prefs which trade in London on the LSE(symbol is HYUD), and IB has access to them for Canadians. I haven't been able to buy some of the other ones I'd like to (Packer's ideas, etc) yet.

[theasiareport]

I can second Boom. I've used them to get Preferred shares of Hyundai and Samsung pretty easily.

[rb]

Well I am looking for smaller companies in Korea. The big guys as you say are easy to get. IB also has single stock futures for a bunch (10 or so) Korean stocks but they also tend to be the blockbuster companies of Korea.

 

It looks like if we wanna trade something else we need to open local accounts. In the US you at least have Schwab and Fidelity - they'll fleece ya but if you have a good idea you can at least execute it. If you have a double in the making, paying an extra 1% is not so terrible.