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Hello All.

I hope I am posting this in the right place.

I have under R200 000 doing nothing in an FnB account for the past year.Its basically my savings,but I want to invest it.

I would like to invest it long-term.I am thinking of investing it aggressively.I am willing to take a risk if a fund/stock is likely to succeed and/or has a history of doing so.So I would say 50% money invested aggressively,and 50% of my money in a moderately aggressive fund/stock etc.

I have been looking at Unit trusts such as Coronation top 20,Coronation Industrial,Allen Gray Equity fund and Allen Gray Balance and was going to invest in a combination of 3 of those Trusts,mainly in the Allen Gray Equity fund.I am interested in investing in  equity.

More recently I have read that allot of your profits go to fund managers and I would like to avoid that.At the same time I know nothing about investments.

After reading some investment recommendations on forums on the web I would like to invest a good portion of my money with Satrix Indi. To cut out the middleman I was interested in buying shares directly on JSE from SAtrixindi.

I am not in country so I cannot go directly to a stock website like  http://trade.imara.co/imaraco/,since they require too much documentation to be acquired and handed in person.

Do you have any suggestions for a newbie like me?

I am South African but do not work in the country,so easy internet access to things is a plus.

Do you have a south african bank account? It'll already be fica'd so you could simply add share trading to that.

Quote from: Patrick on July 18, 2013, 03:45:32 pm

Do you have a south african bank account? It'll already be fica'd so you could simply add share trading to that.

He does say that he has R200K in FNB but I don't know how good their platform is.

I have a South African bank account with internet banking.

I heard that it is more expensive to use a bank as a platform,not sure if its true,but I may have no other choice in the matter right now,since I may probably not be able to forward new Fica documents to Imara,Allen Gray,Satrix,or whomever.

This puts a spanner in the works.I was looking forward to buying into that CML stock that's all the rage. Maby I'm abit too eager.

This is the Brokerage fees.Is it a good deal?
https://www.fnb.co.za/stock-broking/index.html

Does anyone have any insight on this matter?

I had exactly the same (out of country) issue as you.  No Fica required to open an FNB share trading account (if you're already FNB).  Both offerings are competitive.  Their order system is a bit weird but it works.

Thanks for your input.The only problem is that I am using a bank account in South Africa that is in my brothers name (Fn'B)

This is because my bank account was closed apparently due to insufficient funds.It has been closed for almost 2 years now.

So I think I would rather like to get my account Re-opened as a forum member suggested.Does anyone know exactly how to go about doing this?I am overseas right now and will be for the foreseeable future.

I will e-mail my Bank (Standard Bank),and ask them how to go about re-opening the account as a start.

Delusion - I think you are going to run into a few problems opening an account in SA - for a start you will need to go through FICA and FIAS and one of the requirements is a municple account or a SARS ITR12 schedule with you physical address on here in RSA. Secondly your bank may well enquire under what circumstances you left SA did you just up roots and move on, did you inform SARS and as I recall to be classified as a citizen you need to show that you have resided in the country (SA) for 180 days; did you apply for dual citizenship i.e. Britain and SA. Also when you left the country was it your intention to live in another country or are you on a visa which is renewable annually, if you elected to live in another country did you apply for citizenship - has it been granted. If you are a citizen of a foreign country as far as I know you can open an account in RSA but you would require certain minimum criteria to be met for the Bank to open the account. I think you really need to do two things - read up on the SARS website what you can/can't do and check with a bank here in SA whether you can indeed open an account with them while you are sitting in a foreign country and what documentation they would require. What you don't want is to not be able to move your funds around internationally and here the operative factor may well be where are the funds coming from SA or outside SA if from within SA then you may well find that these funds could be blocked and you would not be able to remit them overseas but you could use the funds for gifts, holidays and other travel related expenditure while in SA 

Orca-I have decided to rather re-open my old account and transfer the money to it,then take it from there.What a mission.

grc-I am on an annually renewable contract and I am still a citizen of RSA. I have to make it clear that I had an old bank account ,which was apparently closed due to insufficient funds.This is the account that I want to re-open.Will it have to be Fica'ed again?

Really depends on whether their records are up to scratch - normally you close and account and file all other documentation with the opening account forms, but, knowing how the Banks handled FICA in the first place merely convince them to find the docs or record that you were Fica'd for the original account.

I tried to re-open my account,this was the second time I tried.They said that the account cannot be re-opened, even though its under 2 years old.I have to open a new account and I have to come into the bank.I did not disclose that I was out of the country.

So Im not too sure what to do at this point.Pretty frustrating,my money has been  depreciating over these 2 years.

Any suggestions at all?Im kinda stuck.

Also,any suggestions of what to do with money that I have outside of South Africa?

Delusion - most od the big 4 banks in SA have London offices. You could try and open a South African bank account with the London office on the basis that you want remit funds out of your contract salary back home for family support or whatever. If this fails enquire whether you can open a broker account with them and use your external funds to purchase SA equities. The last option I can think of is that your could open a U/T account with one of the funds and then you could transfer the SA held capital to them. When you return to SA on holiday then you could tackle opening a bank account - i.e. you may come back here between contracts and on holiday