The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued an advisory against the use of eToro to anyone living in the Philippines.
What is the advisory about?
Basically, the Philippine SEC is saying that eToro doesn’t have the license to offer securities to anyone in the Philippines since they are not a registered corporation in the Philippines.
Why is the SEC doing this?
It is part of their duty to ensure that platforms like eToro that offer investments, trading, and securities are registered entities in the Philippines before they can offer them to us, Filipinos.
So expect that they will go after other platforms as well just like what they’re doing to eToro and Binance, albeit, they’ll start with the well-known ones first.
Kuya Well’s corner
Until eToro themselves ban us Filipinos from using their platform, I won’t stop using eToro. Why? If we only join platforms that the SEC approves, then, the only other option at the moment to invest in the US stock market is through Shari-Shari since there are no other operators/companies that have secured licenses to be able to offer US stock trading. Although GCash and Maya are working on offering US stock market in their apps but we don’t know when they can do so. As for Shari-Shari, I don’t like their fees. They have too many fees in my opinion.