My first investment with EasyEquities

Last updated on 22 February 2021

You may be shocked to hear that I only started my first investment with EasyEquities in December 2018. What kind of a personal finance blogger am I if I haven’t been using their platform for years? Well, before you start judging me too much let me redeem myself by saying I’ve started now and at least I’m off the mark. LOL

Having said that though there may be some of you reading this who don’t even know what Easy Equities is and that’s pretty much how I was just a few months ago.

PS – This is not a sponsored post so I’m not trying to convince you to use this platform but rather just sharing my experience and a personal easy equities review.

So what is EasyEquities?

You can head over to their site to see exactly what they do but to explain in one sentence; they’re a South African investment platform that allows to invest any amount of money into any shares or ETF’s. What makes them great is that there’s no monthly fees and you can literally invest just R10 if that’s all you have.

The site is really easy to use and the easy equities fees are very transparent and pretty fair. They’ve really made investing in the stock market (locally and internationally) accessible to us ordinary folk who don’t have million dollar investments and personal brokers. See why investment fees matter.

Why share my investment details publicly?

As I’ve just started investing with EasyEquities I figured that it’s a good idea to share my actual investment figures. This obviously opens me up to much scrutiny and judgement but at the same time the conversations in the comments below and via social media will hopefully be positive and insightful. I’m sure I’ll do things that others disagree with and in the short period of investing I’ve already decided on a better investment strategy.

My goal with this is to create a space for communication and enable us all to learn from each other.

I’ll probably only invest between R500 – R1000 per month and depending on the feedback I receive from this post, I may create a monthly post sharing my actual investment choices and figures. So if you would be interested in a monthly post let me know!

A few important things to note are:

• this is my actual investment with Easy Equities, not just made up numbers
• share prices change by the minute so if one investment is good for me this week it may not mean it will still be good next week
• I am investing for the long term so I will not be chopping & changing investments trying to chase the next big thing
• I won’t be speculating and trying to predict companies to invest in
• and most importantly, I’m not a financial adviser! You can follow what I’m doing but I am not offering this as financial advice. You can click here to contact a financial adviser

My current investment with EasyEquities

My investments with Easy Equities so far are as follows:

• R50 voucher from Easy Equities when I signed up in December 2018
• R200 invested in late December 2018
• R500 invested in January 2019

Thus a total of R750

I don’t feel it’s worth detailing the exact days I invested, share prices & fees as that level of complexity is a little boring to say the least. The fact is that I started with R750, paid some fees and right now I have R776.86 (R26.86 more than what I started with).

The last two or three weeks have been very up & down though and at some point I had lost about R15 but now it’s back up. It’s really important to not make emotional decisions. 

If I continue this series then I’ll probably create some graphs showing growth over time but it’s only been a few weeks so it’s not quite worth doing that right now.

The reason that the Purchase Value shown adds up to more than R750 is that I initially bought R50 shares in Satrix Top 40 but then sold them a few weeks later and rather bought the Ashburton Top 40.

UPDATE: Since posting this I’ve been informed that I misread the Satrix Fact Sheets and that the Satrix Top 40 is indeed the cheapest Top 40 ETF in South Africa. I’ll need to decide what to do now. I am learning already!!

I also received a small dividend (about R1 or thereabouts) which I reinvested.

My Investment Strategy

I started off very excitedly and just bought some “Top 40” ETF’s without having any plan or idea of what to do. You can read this post to see what ETF’s are. Luckily though I’m starting off small so mistakes don’t really matter too much now.

I’m investing for the long-term and currently have 100% invested in local equity of which approximately 65% is invested the Ashburton Top 40 fund and 35% in an Equally Weighted Top 40 fund. This is fine for now but not actually a great investment strategy.

After reading some of posts from Stealthy Wealth and ETF Enthusiast I decided that I needed a proper investment strategy and some goals to work towards.

I decided that I would like to invest in ETF’s and that my portfolio should be split as follows:

• 35% Local Equities CoreShares Equally Weighted Top 40
• 5% Local Equities Ashburton Top 40
• 40% Offshore Equities – Satrix Worldwide
• 10% Local Property – Satrix Property ETF
• 10% Offshore Property – Sygnia Global Property ETF

This way I have exposure to both local and offshore equities and property.

Update on my investments with Easy Equities

I got a message on Twitter about some of my ETF choices. I’ll need to investigate more and possibly change my proposed portfolio. Thanks for the feedback so far!

Read the replies to this tweet…

My first investment with Easy Equities @EasyEquities

I only started in December and here are all the details… Half thinking of a monthly update on my investments – let me know if you’d be interested…@CharlesHSavage @ImcocoMash @mayaonmoney https://t.co/UfyLIHwZUP pic.twitter.com/37yqizD4w3

— Brendan (@your_money_blog) February 24, 2019

From now on when investing I’ll aim to build up my portfolio like this so it may take a few months before I have the ratios as I would like them but that’s okay, I’m not really in a rush. Buying and selling always incur costs so I would rather just plan my future investments a little better and shape my investments over time.

It’s important to note though that there is no “right” investment strategy really. It’s a personal choice and depends on your own outlook on life, local markets, international markets and what you feel about the future and what you think will be a good diversified portfolio. Having said that though, some investment strategies will definitely work better than others so don’t just jump blindly into it. Read, learn, educate yourself and seek advice if you’re uncertain.

To close

EasyEquities is certainly not the only investment platform in South Africa, but it is probably the cheapest and simplest to use. It allows you to invest small amounts as and when you can and you have full control of what you invest in. They also have a great “Demo Account” where you can safely “play” with various ideas as you invest “play money” and can simulate actual investments.

If you would like to follow my monthly investment choices and see how things go then please either comment here for tag me on Social Media.

And is easy equities safe? Absolutely! From an investment company and back-end point of view; YES! If however you make bad investment decisions, that’s on you. If you are wondering how to make money with easy equities, well, you can follow my investment strategy but this is by no ways a “quick” or “easy” money-making scheme. This is proper investing.

And if you’re unsure of how to start investing you can also read my post on where to invest R100 per month.

Follow my ETF Investments:

Update as at end of March 2019

The update as at end of July 2019

Update as at end of November 2019