I follow a great many investors on different social platforms. The bulk of them are based in the US, with some from Canada and Australia. I find that there are some significant differences between them and my own situation.
I live in Norway, and while generally, that is great, investing-wise it is not very beginner friendly.
Lack of good platforms
I look at platforms like Robinhood, M1 finance and Webull with envy, because there is really nothing like it where I live. The banks and brokers do have their apps and their web-platforms, I use two of them. And while they do have their benefits, the level of control and user-friendliness that seem to be there in the American platforms is really lacking in the Norwegian ones.
Fees
Oh man! Lately more and more of the American brokers have announced they are going commission-free. That is something I can only dream about. On one of my accounts, there is about a 20$ fee for each purchase. Needless to say, you will need to invest a lot of money and the stock price would have to appreciate a lot before I’m ever in the green. Granted, some trades are somewhat cheaper, but it’s still a major concern when I want to buy a stock. Buying one or two stocks of a company (depending on the stock price of course) is seldom a good idea. I have to wait a while until the commission makes up as small a percentage as I’m comfortable with before I make a purchase.
No DRIPs or fractional shares
A DRIP is a Dividend ReInvestment Plan that is offered in many places, but I have never seen any mention of it with any of the Norwegian brokers. It means that the dividends you earn from owning a company is automatically reinvested into the same company, sometimes at a discount. That means that your holding will automatically grow over time even without you investing any more into that company. That is not the case here. In order for your holding to grow, you will have to manually purchase more whole shares in the company. There is no (to my knowledge) any fractional shares available either. Whole shares or nothing!
Dividend policies
While there are exceptions, most Norwegian companies pay out a yearly dividend rather than quarterly. And most of them are paid out in May. While this is not a huge problem, it makes it harder to have a long term strategy of living off of dividends. Norwegian companies seldom have a policy of increasing their dividend over time. The policy is usually to pay out a certain percentage of earnings or something similar. Therefore they are very likely to cut dividends during leaner times. There is also a public sentiment of negativity towards dividend payouts, especially when companies pay dividends during times of cutting back or layoffs.
While there has been movement towards more beginner friendly investing in Norway over the past years, we still have a long way to go before the barrier to entry is low enough for regular people to be enticed into investing. Tax-delayed accounts have been introduced and there has been an amnesty for moving investments into the tax-delayed accounts. However, that amnesty closed in December 2019. One thing that really bugs me about those accounts is you can’t invest in American stocks there. Only Norwegian and EU stocks. So I have my European investments in these so-called AKS (Aksjesparekonto) and the rest in a regular taxed account.