Why personal investing is so difficult in Colombia?

Compare to US or Canada, we are years behind

A lot of people always message me about investment opportunities in Colombia, from regular commercial businesses ventures up to how to buy land to search for oil. I can see the enthusiasm foreigners have in emerging markets.

But one of the most recurrent questions are related to the stock market in Colombia and here I’m going to tell you my experience with it and what I think about the barriers for investors, specially personal investors that just want to put some money to work in the markets.

Since 2017 I started to read a lot everything about stock markets and company analysis, my first starting point were Warren Buffet’s videos and interviews, following to the well known book The Intelligent Investors, and also some technical analysis books. But my main approach was value investing and the financial fundamentals. I tried to approach day trading but it didn’t really resonated with me.

As when you start to learn something, you get pumped up about putting everything you think you know into practice, I had some pesos that I wanted to start investing. I knew I just wanted to get some money to start working in the markets, and from what I read and also some conferences I attended, Colombian landscape regarding stock markets were having an opportunity, at that time many stocks were valued at a lower price. I believed it was time to start.

But I crashed into the reality, personal investing is and at that time still wasn’t well stablished. This is what I mean: to invest, you need a broker, and usually banks have branches that work specifically in the financial markets and provide that service. The problem was the entry barriers they stablished.

The brokers in Colombia asked for minimum investments, the minimum investment ranged from $10’000.000 to $30’000.000 (around 5 to 10k USD). It was insane, I just wanted to put some money to work, and I didn’t have that one to invest. Summing to that, transactions and trades had a commission, regardless of the amount, can’t really remember but it was high, lets say 2-3%.

And I did a lot of research and asking, and wasn’t able to open an account.

What I can say is this, mutual funds are easy to open and manage. I have some money in some Bancolombia funds that have growth considerably. As many of you, I rather have my money keep working rather than having it saved in my chequing account, that’s just stupid to me.

I checked tons of YouTube videos, in NorthAmerica they had many options to personal investing, everyone can open accounts in RobinHood, Ameritrade, QuesTrade, Wealthsimple. Now, if you are Colombian that was the conditions you had to navigate to be able to be in the stock market. Lots of barriers, not easy access to personal investing and high commissions.

But now, Colombians have a personal investing app called Trii. You can buy stocks in the app, same as any other personal banking app. I use it now, I can see its easy to use and its the first big approach to personal investing we Colombians can really use.

The good thing: is easy to use, is the first one to open the market to small investors, easy to buy and sell, access to national and some US stocks.

The bad thing: still charges commission, is hard to track your portfolio gains/looses, you can’t buy fractional shares, not enough technical or fundamental info about companies.

I think this app still has room for improvement and it opens the landscape of the personal investing world to Colombia. It will provide help to many people to get more literate in the investment world and get more money into the financial markets.

We can still keeping sharing insights about the Colombian and US stock market, crypto and everything related to investment. This is a topic I like constantly read and improve from many of you that are extremely good and experienced. Send me a message if you would like that.

You can download the app here:

And for my investment in US/Canada market I use WealthSimple, if you want to check it can use the code UN1WDW to get a free stock:

(Those are affiliate links)