Here’s Opening Bell 🔔: your stock market fix to start the week

Welcome to the Opening Bell 🔔! Delivered every Monday via email and through the Tech in Asia website, this free newsletter breaks down the biggest stories and latest trends on Asia’s publicly listed tech companies. If you’re not a subscriber, get access by registering here.

Hello reader,

This being the first edition of the Opening Bell, it’s only appropriate that we touch on the retail trading frenzy that has gripped stock markets around the world. Easy access to online brokerages – coupled with a bit of FOMO – amid the Covid-19 pandemic drove countless tech-savvy millennials to park idle money in stocks.

However, a closer look reveals a hidden underlying trend. It seems that online broking startups in Asia have stolen a march on their more experienced banking counterparts.

For instance, Zerodha, a fintech darling of Indian millennials, shook up the decades-old broking industry with its zero-brokerage-fee model and is now comfortably the country’s largest broker, having more than double the active clients than its closest listed counterpart, ICICI Securities Ltd (ISEC, NSE), which runs the trading platform ICICIDirect.

Meanwhile, online stock brokerage Ajaib in 2021 became Indonesia’s fastest unicorn and is leaving more established players, such as Bank Mandiri’s Mandiri Sekuritas (BMRI, IDX), biting the dust, having captured over a million of the archipelago’s roughly 2.7 million equity investors.

However, given the close links between online stock broking and digibank services, Ajaib may soon face heated competition from players such as Bukalapak (BUKA, IDX), which is set to enter Indonesia’s digibank race.

The Indonesian ecommerce giant’s co-founders have even doubled down on the fintech sector, with their VC firm, Init 6, joining the seed round of Monit, a B2B fintech startup, Tech in Asia exclusively reported.

Speaking of ecommerce giants, we released the first episode of our video series on how Shopee made use of Sea Group’s (SE, NYSE) war chest and Tencent’s backing to dethrone Lazada and become Southeast Asia’s top ecommerce platform within five years.

Meanwhile, IPO-bound J&T Express, another Tencent-backed company, is making waves. With a pre-money valuation of about US$20 billion, the logistics firm has scaled new heights by riding the boom in Indonesia’s ecommerce space. Our premium story looks at the keys to its global ambitions.

And, now back to the pandemic-induced retail trading boom, which has led to wild market swings and even brought on the “meme stock” phenomenon (members of ​​r/BursaBets and r/WallStreetBets, we’re looking at you 👀). However, this is not always a good thing, as the cautionary tale of stockbroking app Robinhood (HOOD, NDAQ) has shown us.

The online stockbroking pioneer has seen its share price collapse by around 84% from its 52-week high of US$85 after heightened regulatory scrutiny. Additionally, the US trading frenzy has shown signs of waning amid climbing interest rates and inflation.

It has not all been smooth sailing for online stockbrokers in Asia either. Stocks of Tencent-backed Futu Holdings (FUTU, NDAQ) and UP Fintech (TIGR, NDAQ), which runs Tiger Brokers, have endured a torrid year despite churning out promising numbers.

They have come under the microscope as China’s central bank has warned that online brokerages not licensed by Beijing were operating illegally if they were serving Chinese clients through the internet.

— Shravanth