General advice for investing in stock in NZ,
I try to have a 50:50 split between my local share holding and overseas. Local here includes Australia as the NZ market is very small and the correlation between Aus/NZ is close enough to basically ignore any differences. Investing locally you have lots of decent options:
-buy directly on the ASX/NZX sharemarkets through Direct Broking or ASB securities
-buy NZX-listed ETFs (Smartshares)
-invest in managed funds (e.g. through Rabodirect)
-passive "fund of funds" with Superlife
(There are probably lots of other, these are just the ones I am most familiar with)
Buy directly on the ASX/NZX sharemarkets through Direct Broking or ASB securities
To go this route you probably want to have at least $60,000 to start with. Trades should be at >$6000 to minimise the brokerage cost, so not a good way to "drip-feed" savings into an investment. Direct Broking is very slightly cheaper (last time I checked) but ASB securities is very convenient if you are already with ASB (I use ASB). By choosing the right shares on the ASX you can avoid the annoying tax issues brought up in the other thread. You can also buy US/UK shares this way but it looks tricky and I'm holding off on it for now.
Buy NZX-listed ETFs (Smartshares)
Easy exposure to 10 - 50 NZ/Aus companies with fairly good liquidity. Expense ratios are high for ETFs but they are not too bad. The SmartOZZY at 0.6% is the cheapest way to get Aus stock exposure that I know of from an NZ-based product. Again your initial investment should be over the $6000 mark to minimise brokerage but after that you can enter their savings program to "drip-feed" in regular savings without this brokerage charge. They also offer a DRIP which is handy. The downside is they are only local investment options although I have heard they are looking at more ETF options, hopefully with some international exposure, in the near future.
Invest in managed funds (e.g. through Rabodirect)
Rabodirect have a nice series of actively managed funds with a diversity of investment choices. These are funds from finance companies (e.g. Tyndall, AMP, Fischer, etc). The stock options here include local, international, emerging markets, and growth (both local and international), so you can tailor your investment choices based on your risk profile. For managed funds, their management fees are pretty low (approx 1% - but it varies) and you have to pay a 0.75% purchasing fee when you buy, there is no selling fee. The minimum is $250 which makes it easy to set up a diverse portfolio.
Passive "fund of funds" with Superlife
Superlife offers a similar set of funds to Rabobank. You can easily select a range of local, international, and growth stock and control the percentages. Even better, they have automatic rebalancing which makes this a very simple investment choice. My understanding of what they do is create a passive fund of passive funds which keeps management fees low. I think they offer stand-alone investments as well as Kiwisaver funds. I’m currently looking to switch my Kiwisaver over to them but don’t know as much about them as the other options I listed above.
Hope this is helpful and that other people can chime in with their experiences/ideas around NZ investing. There’s probably a lot that I still have to learn.