Moomoo Inc. is an equity trading platform based in the Silicon Valley in California. If you attempt to learn more about the company with a simple Google search, you may find that Moomoo is heavily associated with Futu Holdings Ltd. In fact, Moomoo is a fully owned subsidiary of Futu Holding Ltd.
Futu is not based in the United States but instead is a well recognized and top-ranked online broker based in Asia. Futu is uniquely backed by world-class investors and has successfully etched itself in history as a top Asia-based fintech Unicorn.
The company made its way into history by creating unique in-house state of the art trading systems. These systems are innovative and have helped solve trader challenges and have played a role in shaping the current industry landscape.
Moomoo was created by experts at Futu as the brokerage of the future. To accomplish this goal, the creators embedded Moomoo with many capabilities that are unique to the platform.
One of the frontline capabilities is that Moomoo has a user-friendly platform for investors of all skill levels. Perhaps the more distinguishing capabilities though are for more advanced investors.
These more advanced advantages include information on a company's capital flow model, advanced graphs, technical indicators, professional third-party research, and more! Many investors have given high praises to Moomoo as being their investment research platform of choice.
One of the largest recent benefits that has come from this platform is that Moomoo is a commission-free trading platform. However, even commission-free trading accounts can have fees!
To learn more about all of the advantages of Moomoo, head to our Moomoo Summary article. While this article will cover many of the advantages of using Moomoo, the main purpose is to cover all of the fees associated with the Moomoo platform.
As introduced above, Moomoo is a commission-free trading platform. However, there are organizations called SROs or self-regulatory organizations that charge fees on all sell orders regardless of brokerage.
Moomoo is not exempt from these fees and thus passes them along to the customer.
According to the official Moomoo website, there are four main buckets of fees associated with Moomoo accounts. The first three buckets are applicable fees to all equity investors while the fourth bucket focuses on fees specific to options trading. The four high-level buckets are listed below.
It is interesting to note that the Moomoo website states that there has currently been a platform promotion that has made using the platform free for all users.
However, in the fine print it states, “Promotion begins on Nov 2018 and may end at anytime with 30 days notification ahead.” So although the platform is free right now, Moomoo may have plans to change that in the future.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, also known as FINRA, is required by law to pay the regulatory transaction fee to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). FINRA takes this fee and passes it to its members, including Moomoo, who then passes the fees to the customers.
This rate is subject to change throughout the year but is used to pay the government for regulating and supervising the security markets. This fee is to help pay for organizations such as the SEC.
Luckily this fee only applies to stock and option sale orders and is relatively small. For every $1M of sales, the regulatory transaction fee is $22.90. In other words, this fee is 0.00229% of sale orders and is rounded to the nearest penny.
The trading activity fee is a little bit different than the regulatory transaction fee. However, there are many similarities between the two fees.
FINRA charges the trading activity fee to all brokerage firms to help pay for the regulation and supervising brokerage firms. Unlike the regulatory transaction fee, the trading activity fee is determined by the number of shares sold (rather than a percentage of the sale).
The trading activity fee is $0.00013 for each equity share sold and $0.00218 for each option contract sold. This fee will always be rounded up to the nearest penny and is capped at $6.49 per order execution.
The American depositary receipts (ADR) fees are significantly different from the other two fees discussed. ADRs are certificates that are traded on American exchanges that represent foreign stocks.
The banks that issue ADRs may charge $0.01 to $0.05 per share. If this charge is applicable, Moomoo will pass along these fees to the investor.
There are a couple of additional fees that you may want to be aware of as you begin using the Moomoo platform for options trading.
The first is that Moomoo charges a contract fee of $0.65 for each option contract purchased and / or sold. While Robinhood and other companies do not have these contract fees, they are quite common in the world of options trading.
The last note is that there are OCC fees for each contract. The OCC stands for the Options Clearing Corporation that serves as an options trading regulator. This expense is $0.02 a contract and is maxed out at $55.00 a trade (more than 2750 contracts in an order).
Moomoo found extreme success by being one of the popular commission-free trading platforms. Part of this popularity has come from its impressive investor tools such as advanced financial documentation for companies and customizable graphs.
As this article discussed though, even commission-free trading platforms have fees that they pass along to customers. However, it is important to recognize that many of these fees are originating from entities outside of Moomoo. In other words, they are common fees among all investing platforms.
As a quick recap, the four buckets of fees are shown below.
It is also vital to understand that this article does not include a comprehensive list of fees. The above fees are the common fees that apply to the majority of transactions. There are additional fees that cover anything from requesting paper statements to transferring funds outside of Moomoo.
To get the complete list of fees, as well as an update on all fee costs, feel free to check out Moomoo's fee one pager. Since creating a Moomoo account is free, feel free to use one of Investing Simple’s affiliate links to get a free stock from signing up!
