The Cheapest Way to Dollar-Cost Average from Singapore: Which Fee Hurts Most

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Last updated: 16 October 2026 · By Spencer Li, CFTe

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The cheapest way to dollar-cost average from Singapore is the plan whose total cost, as a share of what you put in, stays lowest over the years you will actually invest. For most people that comes down to one test. A fee charged once on each monthly buy costs you that percentage once. A fee charged every year on everything you hold keeps costing you, on a pot that keeps growing.

So before you compare platforms, sort every fee into 2 boxes: per buy and per year. Then work out what each box costs on your monthly amount. A minimum commission can make a cheap-looking broker expensive at SGD 300 a month, and a small yearly fee can grow into the biggest number on the bill after 20 years.

This post names no broker, bank or app, and it carries no referral link. It answers a question that turns up again and again on Singapore forums: what is the cheapest way to put a fixed sum into an ETF or SGX shares every month?

Is dollar-cost averaging even the right plan?

For a salaried investor, it is mostly not a choice. Your money arrives monthly, so you invest it monthly.

The research question is a different one. If you already hold a lump sum, should you invest it all at once or feed it in over a year? Vanguard looked at exactly that in a 2012 paper, across the US, the UK and Australia, and found that “an LSI approach has outperformed a DCA approach approximately two-thirds of the time”. LSI is lump-sum investing. The paper’s own explanation is that stocks and bonds beat cash over the period it studied, so money left waiting in cash missed some of the rise. It also grants the other side its due, and says spreading the money out may help an investor who is “primarily concerned with minimizing downside risk and potential feelings of regret”.

Now, don’t take that as a reason to feel bad about monthly investing. The same paper is about a windfall. Someone saving SGD 800 from each pay cheque has no lump sum to deploy, and the monthly plan is simply how the money shows up. The point of this post is the cost of doing it, because that is the part you control.

Which fees do you actually pay on a monthly plan?

More than the headline suggests. MoneySense, the national financial education site, puts it plainly: “Bid-ask spreads, brokerage commissions, and withholding taxes also affect your net return.”

Here are the fee types, sorted into the 2 boxes.

On SGX, MoneySense notes that on top of the broker’s commission “there is a CDP clearing fee and SGX trading access fee. Please note that GST is payable on all fees.” And on unit trust platforms, it puts the platform fee at “0 – 0.3% per annum of the total value of fund holdings”.

[INFOGRAPHIC: the per-buy versus per-year test as two boxes, with each fee type dropped into its box and the 20-year cost of 0.5% in each box shown underneath]

Why does a per-year fee hurt more than a per-buy fee?

Because the per-year fee is charged on your whole balance, every year, and the balance grows.

Here is the hypothetical arithmetic. Suppose you invest SGD 500 a month for 20 years, and the portfolio grows at 6% a year before costs. That 6% is an assumption for the example and nothing more. With no costs at all, the pot ends at about SGD 227,800.

Now add one fee at a time.

• A fee of 0.5% on each buy costs about SGD 1,100 over the 20 years. That is 0.5% of the final pot.
• A fee of 0.5% a year on everything you hold costs about SGD 12,400. That is 5.5% of the final pot.

The same 0.5%, written on 2 different fee pages, and one costs about 11 times more than the other. I find this the most useful single fact about monthly investing, because the fee pages make the 2 look identical.

Do note that a yearly fee is sometimes worth paying, because it buys something real, like automatic rebalancing or a fund you would struggle to build yourself. Plenty of people sleep better knowing a machine is doing the boring part for them. The point is to know the price before you agree to it. A 1% yearly fee, on the same example, costs about SGD 24,100, or 10.6% of the pot.

When does a minimum commission become the biggest cost?

When your monthly amount is small. A minimum commission is a fixed dollar fee, so its weight depends entirely on the size of the order. It works like the fixed booking fee on a cinema ticket, which hardly matters when you book for a family of 5 and stings when you go alone on a weeknight.

Take a hypothetical minimum of SGD 10 per trade. On a SGD 2,000 monthly buy, that is 0.5%. On a SGD 500 buy, it is 2%. Run the 20-year example with 2% on every buy and the cost comes to about SGD 4,600, which is still less than the 0.5% yearly fee, but it is a lot to pay for a single click each month.

There are 2 ways around it. The first is a regular savings plan, which some banks and brokers run for a fixed monthly amount. MoneySense says “ETF RSPs through some brokerages start from $100/month”, and unit trust plans start from “$100–$500 per month”. These usually charge a percentage per buy with a lower minimum, which suits small amounts. The second is to buy less often. Saving SGD 500 a month and buying once a quarter at SGD 1,500 cuts the commission’s share by two-thirds.

Personally, I would rather buy quarterly at a low cost than monthly at a high one. The difference in timing over 20 years is small. The difference in fees is not.

What changes when you buy overseas ETFs?

Two more per-buy costs, and one per-year cost that most people never see.

The first per-buy cost is the currency conversion. Every Singapore dollar becomes a US dollar before it buys a US-listed or a London-listed USD fund. A broker with a low commission, say USD 1 (about SGD 1.28) a trade, can still take a wider cut in the exchange rate. Nobody sends you a bill for it. Compare the rate you get against the mid rate on the same day. The second is the bid-ask spread. MoneySense notes that “If you are investing regularly, a wide spread is an ongoing cost that the TER does not capture.”

The per-year cost is tax. A US-domiciled ETF held by a Singapore investor pays US withholding tax on its dividends, which MoneySense puts at 30%. The fund’s domicile changes that number, and that is a big enough topic to have its own post on choosing an index ETF.

How you hold the shares matters too. Some brokers hold SGX shares in your own CDP account, others hold them in a custodian account in their name. Ask which one you are getting before the first deposit, because it decides who receives the dividends and the company notices directly.

So which plan is cheapest for you?

The one that passes the per-buy versus per-year test on your own monthly amount. Here is the order I would check it in.

1. Write down your monthly amount and how often you will buy.
2. Add up every per-buy fee as a percentage of that amount, including the FX spread.
3. Add up every per-year fee, including the fund’s TER and any platform fee.
4. Treat the per-year total as roughly 10 times more expensive than it looks over 20 years.

A robo-adviser usually wins on step 2 and loses on step 3, which is why the robo-adviser or DIY question is really a question about what the yearly fee buys you. A plain ETF bought in larger, less frequent lots usually wins on step 3 and can lose on step 2 when the amounts are small.

If you want the bigger picture, the DIY guide to building your investment portfolio covers where the monthly money should go in the first place, and rebalancing covers what to do once it is invested. Bogle’s case for low costs is summarised in our book summary of The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

If you want a 15-minute daily routine for the trading side of your money, the free checklist is at the end of this post.

So which box holds most of your fees today, and did you know it before you read this?

FAQ

What is the cheapest way to dollar-cost average in Singapore?

The cheapest plan is the one with the lowest total cost on your own monthly amount. Fees charged every year on your whole balance usually cost far more over 20 years than fees charged once on each buy, so compare the yearly fees first.

Is dollar-cost averaging better than investing a lump sum?

For a lump sum, Vanguard’s 2012 study found investing it at once beat spreading it out about two-thirds of the time. For a monthly salary, there is no lump sum, so monthly investing is simply how the money arrives.

Does a minimum commission matter for small monthly amounts?

Yes. A fixed SGD 10 minimum is 2% of a SGD 500 buy but 0.5% of a SGD 2,000 buy. Buying less often, or using a regular savings plan with a lower minimum, reduces it.

Should I include the currency conversion cost?

Yes. Every overseas ETF buy converts Singapore dollars first, and the spread on that conversion is a per-buy cost that does not appear on the commission line.

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About the author. Spencer Li is the founder of Synapse Trading and a Certified Financial Technician (CFTe). His trade log is public: every trade since April 2024, dated, losses left in.

Educational content only, not personalised financial advice. Trading carries risk, including loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Synapse Trading is not licensed or regulated by MAS.

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