{COL Financial Tutorial} How to Buy Stocks

This is the seventh post in The Complete Guide to COL Financial. To read all posts in order, start with Who Can Open An Account then continue reading the rest of the series on this page.

In this lesson, you’ll learn to put your first stock buy order.

Step 1: Log On the Col Financial Website (www.colfinancial.com) with your log-in details

Step 2: Make sure that the market is open.

Market hours are Mondays to Fridays, 9:30am to 11:30 am and 1:30pm to 3:30.

What if the market is closed?

You can also put off-hour orders (or orders after the trading hours) to be posted in the exchange the next trading day. This feature is especially useful for people who have no time to watch the market during the trading hours. Great for employees who are working during the trading hours, or for those overseas who are in a different timezone. One disadvantage though with placing off-hour orders is that the order price is based on the day’s closing price, which is not necessarily going to be the opening price the next trading day. {Click here on how to place an Off-Hours Order.}

Step 3: Hover your cursor to ‘Trade’ and click ‘Enter Order’.

The screen below appears. This is the Order Screen Area where you place the details of your order. And below, you can see you cash balance available for buying.

Step 4: On this page, you would fill in 3 boxes: Stock Code, # of Shares and Price.

Stock Code: Let’s say you want to buy Megaworld. Stock code of Megaworld is MEG. So, we type MEG on the Stock Code box. And all info about MEG will appear. The most important ones you should know are the Bid, Ask and Board Lot. All the rest, you can just ignore.

# of Shares: Here, we fill in the number of share we want to buy. So, we look at the Board Lot to know the minimum # that you can buy. In this case, the minimum we could buy is 1000 shares. If we want to add more, it has to be in multiples of 1000. Not 1100, 900 or 1500. It should be 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 and so on. For this example, we type 1000 on the # of Shares box.

Price: Here, we put in the Price you want to buy the shares for. Now, always remember this: BUY at the Ask, and SELL at the BID. If you want your order to be executed immediately, refer to the price on the first row which is the lowest price being asked by the sellers. In this case, it’s Php 4.24.

To recap, our order is 1000 shares of MEG at 4.24/share, for a total of Php4,240.00. So, why is it Php 4,263.03?

Step 5: Click on ‘Preview Order’ for details.

On this page, you will see that our order is Php4,240 (4.24/share x 1000 shares) + VAT and other charges amounting to Php 23.03 = Php 4,263.03.

Step 6: If you see the confirmation message below, you have successfully placed in your buy order for your first stocks. If you would like to buy more stocks, click ‘Place Another Order.’ (You’ll also receive notice within the next 24 hours in your COL Account, wherein you will be asked to enter your password to confirm your order. You’ll also receive a confirmation email.)

And that’s how you buy stocks… I hope you’ve learned something.

Reviewing Your Stock Order

Hover your cursor to ‘Trade’ and click on ‘Trading History’. Since, we’re just checking today’s, just click on ‘Show Orders’ right away.

In this case, my MEG order was Accepted, Posted and then Executed.

Viewing your Stock Portfolio

Hover your mouse to ‘Trade’ and click ‘Portfolio’. This is the page I like to check up on once in a while. The stock portfolio page displays a summary of our account details which includes our stocks with its current market value and our actual cash balance.