Business Strategy and Finance

Stock trading in Thailand is easier than ever, with scores of companies offering access to global stocks through convenient and versatile platforms. Here, we look at 5 of the top stock brokers servicing Thailand at the time of writing.Considerations Before Trading in ThailandWhether you're new to the industry or an experienced trader looking for new opportunities, it's crucial to consider several key factors before choosing a broker. These include evaluating fees and commissions, the broker's features and trading platform, and ensuring it matches your trading style.Regulatory Compliance and Security : Ensure the broker is not restricted from offering services in your region. Additionally, check the security measures the broker has in place to protect your investments and personal information from unauthorized access or cyber threats.: Ensure the broker is not restricted from offering services in your region. Additionally, check the security measures the broker has in place to protect your investments and personal information from unauthorized access or cyber threats. Trading Platforms and Tools : The quality and user-friendliness of a broker's trading platform are crucial for a smooth trading experience

Hitoshi, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Alpaca notes that Alpaca has transitioned to self-clearing at DTCC.As noted in a blog post, this is a key milestone since they started “a regulated brokerage business five years ago.”It’s a pivotal milestone for them because this means Alpaca has “joined the deepest layer of clearing and settlement in the U.S. marketplace.”As it took us years of effort, this event proves them “as one of the mature players amongst the latest fintech companies,” the company claims.When the founding team started the brokerage business out of Y Combinator, they had thought it would be unreasonable “to spend so much time and money to become self-clearing ourselves.”As their business grew, they claim to have “learned so much about the inefficiency and too many intermediary layers between customers and the core market, and they found big opportunities to innovate it as part of our mission, to provide financial access for everyone on the planet.”As explained in a blog post, Alpaca builds a global de-facto financial platform “from the ground up to achieve this mission.”The traditional brokerage businesses “have been built upon layers on top of layers, with legacy vendor technologies, and pay enormous amounts of money.”This is one of the things that still “prevent everyone on this planet from having fair access to the desired financial markets.”At Alpaca, not only do they claim to be developer-first and API-first, but also they “are a group of true technologists who build with the latest innovations to solve these problems.”Today’s achievement is not just “stemming from their technology and cost reasons.”Throughout their journey with hundreds of fintech players and hundreds of thousands of developers who come to their platform “to build their next dreams, they learned so much about what Alpaca needs to do.”As noted in the update from Alpaca, self-clearing is said to “open up many more opportunities for our platform to enable, from seamless asset transfers to securities lending, as well as more sophisticated solutions such as DVP/RVP for institutional trading.”Alpaca’s proprietary clearing and settlement platform has reportedly “been built with modern architecture in mind.”It was built from the ground up “with an idempotent event driven architecture.”In order to facilitate bidirectional communication with DTCC and NSCC, they created event abstraction adapters “for bidirectional external via FIX, IBM MQ and SFTP to simplify the services producing or consuming and improves resilience and fosters composable testing and event sequence replay.”Their underlying event platform, The Alpaca Universal Transaction System (UTS), uses Flatbuffers “for zero-copy data interchange on top of Redpanda for efficient high-throughput and low latency messaging with elastic tiered storage that scales without sacrificing performance for highly active message topics.”In the past articles, Alpaca says they “introduced their distributed WAL-based in-memory Order Management System, and high-throughput non-blocking ledger for 24×7/365 operations.”Not only do these play important roles in this self-clearing, but they “have also made another innovation by building a fully event-driven clearing system from scratch.”With this architecture, they are ready “for the transition to T+1 that’s coming up soon, but also poised for a foreseeable T+0 future migration as well as current same day settlement for institutional trade processing.”Self-clearing requires complex business processes, “managing risks of settlement for large numbers of investors, and keeping everything in compliance to protect customers and the markets.”To run smooth operations and be in compliance with everything required, Alpaca has gathered star players who “bring tons of experience from their past lives in the industry (don’t get it wrong, many of us are from the latest fintech space, not only decade-old firms).”Why? Because every one of them claim to believe in Alpaca’s innovative approach, its business future, and the opportunity “to change the industry with their own hands and brains, like many of our customers feel. Not only does this team build and run the self-clearing journey, they are also here to provide the best experiences for their customers because we are the same innovative-minded team as our customers are.”Becoming self-clearing is definitely not a goal, but it is “just the beginning.”What excites us even more from here is “that this paves the road to building more businesses because of our full control of the process.”They have already announced “that options trading is coming soon, but they can bring more business and product opportunities while they keep enhancing our operational efficiencies for our customer experiences.”In the next few quarters, they hope to “reveal more products to both Broker API and Trading API customers. As a matured platform being self-clearing, they are also expecting to expand segments of customers, such as institutional businesses, U.S. broker-dealer clients, and hedge funds with proven track records.”

Alpaca now supports limit orders and extended hours trading for fractional shares.As noted in a blog post from Alpaca, trading in fractional shares is considered to be “a crucial tool for investors.”Alpaca says that it opens the door “for individuals to invest in stocks that may have been out of reach otherwise.”According to the update from Alpaca, fractional orders also “enables ultra-fine precise asset allocation and portfolio weightings.”Portfolios, regardless of their size, can leverage this feature. Alpaca’s fractional shares trading platform is powered by their custom-built Order Management System (OMS), “designed for ultra-low latency and scale to accommodate millions of investors worldwide.”Today, this feature extends to “support limit fractional quantity or notional value, in addition to market orders we previously supported (stop and stop limit will also be coming soon).”These additional order types are said to be “essential to manage the risks in the fast-moving market and fractional shares trading can now be used for advanced trading strategies for better risk management.”The support of limit orders for fractional shares trading comes “with pre-market (4:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. ET) and post-market (4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. ET) support in addition to the regular trading hours.”Expansion of fractional shares to extended hours “gives more opportunities to global investors, who will enjoy fractional shares trading in their morning and afternoon in Asian, Middle East, and European time zones.”These new capabilities are integrated into “the existing API, and your code can start using them with minimal effort (please see below for more details).”Alpaca is committed to “keeping the API simple and easy to use.”The introduction of these new features positions Alpaca at the forefront of the retail trading sector, “setting it apart from many other brokerage firms that do not offer the same extensive range of options as Alpaca’s fractional trading offering.”With over 5,000 fractional assets available for trading, Alpaca has managed “to maintain high standards of execution quality and speed.”This achievement comes despite the challenges of market risks, thanks to their sophisticated risk management technologies and “adherence to regulatory requirements, including trade reporting.”The advancement of their fractional shares trading is in line with their mission of opening financial services “to everyone on the planet by building a global de-facto standard investment platform.”Alpaca continues to invest in their technology and brokerage services to “provide better experiences to investors worldwide.”Through Broker API, you can now “allow your customers to trade fractional and notional amounts during their localized trading hours, further improving access to US markets internationally.”With the same Orders API you use today, just update your API call “to specify the extended hours flag and change the order type to limit