Tonight CFC Stanbic Financial Services launched online share trading which they say is the first online share trading platform in the country. The actual ceremony was conducted by Information Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo (a Mumias shareholder through CSFS) who noted that while Diaspora Kenyans remitted $2 billion per year, they hand no true seamless mechanism to buy shares – until now. 
It’s a light-weight system accessible to CSFS customers to make trade orders – buy, sell, cancel, monitor volumes, settlements, & trade live at the Nairobi Stock Exchange in real time as well as get statements & portfolio valuations.
Disclaimer: I’ve been a long-term investor through CSFS primarily through e-mailing trades, and this has been quite satisfactory. Enabling online share trading is a service which several brokers have promoted, but delivery has been spotty. The CSFS system is available even on Smartphones,and while SMS and mobile money are not highlighted, these will be features to push for and the service is one to try out and see.
This is fantastic
The CFCFS online trading facility has been running for some time now… more than a year if I recall. It was ‘under maintenance’ for much of that time but I used it to make several trades in the last two months. Some minor annoyances: You could only log in and view your portfolio when the market was closed. When the market was open, you could log in and place buy/sell orders. However, orders would/could not be executed in that trading session, so I failed to see the point. Someone should test drive the new site and tell us what its like.
odegle: give it a go
propaganda: i also tried it in one of the early ‘beta’ phases, but it was scary that it was still hosted on an IT company platform, and you’re sharing your password and trades etc through that, so i stopped. Still, I’ll give it a shot next week
I’m keeping a keen eye on this I really want to know how it works since I do want to trade online.
Bankelele, how effective is email trading? Am I bound to make profits with such gambles in the kenyan stock exchange? will i be able to make more money from my investment if i keep buying and selling? apologies for the many many questions, i’m a rookie in all this!
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@Banks: I’ve tried it out a few times. The facility is a little troublesome: I have trouble logging in a lot of the time and all the buy orders I have placed on the few occasions I’ve logged in expire at the end of the trading day, even though I set them to be valid for seven days (not sure if I’m doing it wrong or its a bug in the software). That said, the new interface is great, provides lots of detail on what is happening in the market or with your trades.
@Joliea: The online facility may tempt some to try day-trading, but I think the way the system and our markets work, anyone that keeps buying and selling speculatively is more likely to pay CFCFS lots of cash in commissions than to rake in lots of cash. I’m sticking to value investing as if I had to rely on a broker to execute trades at snail’s pace. That way, I never buy anything I’m not prepared to hold through tough times.
Nice information, i like it..