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Technology

Best Online Trading Company? 14

Posted by Cliff from the what-do-you-think dept.
Stacy Uden asks: "What is your favorite online trading company? Which one is the best? I am a newbie to online trading, and I am looking to jump into the game. I have heard good things about E*Trade, Charles Schwab, and Vanguard, but I would like to hear the opinion of the Slashdot community! "
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Best Online Trading Company? More

Best Online Trading Company?

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  • I also use Datek and generally like it. It does occasionally have severe slowness problems when the market is moving fast (at least it did the morning after the October 97 mini-crash).

    Cool features on Datek include the Streamer and Island Book Viewer, which let you view stock prices as they move, and see all the orders on NASDAQ stocks.

    Options - I wrote Datek recently asking them about options, and they said they're working on it, but couldn't announce a date when it will be available. We can always hope it will be soon. I'm thinking of openning an E-trade account to get options capability.
  • I've done some extensive searching for an online broker that suits my needs (low cost, fast website that doesn't go down during peak trading hours, ability to trade options and penny stocks, minimum initial deposit of >= $1000...), and I've had a bitch of a time... anyone have any advice for me?

    Here is one page [sonic.net] with very extensive (and uptodate, it appears) reviews of different online brokers. Gomez.com also has a good online broker review page [gomezadvisors.com]. Gomez.com also has great forums where actual users talk about all of the different firms.

    The especially frustrating thing to me is that the reviews simply don't match up! For example, gomez.com raves about etrade.com, while the first page that I link to says that Etrade has had horrible customer support issues and doesn't recommend that anyone join up with them!
  • I've been using DATEK for well over 2 years now and am greatly pleased with their services. Even though I use the Foolish Four Strategy [fool.com] and only trade once a year, I couldn't be more pleased with the low prices ($9.99 per trade), high-availability web site, and reasonable service.

    The only trouble I've had with them was when I forgot my password. I had to call 3 times and they finally ended up FedEx'ing me the new password at their expense.
  • Like the question what is best (computer, OS, editor,etc.), the answer depends on what you want to use it for. One of the best places to find out what questions you need to ask is the Motley Fool [fool.com], which has a whole mini-course on discount brokers, which are virtually all online. It has links to other ratings sites, as well as lively discussion groups.

    Look at their Disco unt Broker Center [fool.com] and the Discount Broker FAQ [fool.com] (requires registration). Sites in the FAQ include Donald J's Really Great Site [sonic.net] and Gomez's rankings [scorecard.com]
  • I've been using SureTrade [suretrade.com] for a couple years now, and have no complaints. Trades are $7.95, and there is no minimum amount required to open an account. The monthly statements are easy to read as well. They also offer a dividend reinvestment plan for stocks that don't offer their own. (You can't purchase partial shares through this DRiP though.)

    I now have six accounts with SureTrade: a regular taxable account, Roth IRAs for my wife and myself, Education IRAs for my children, and a rollover IRA for my wife. With all those accounts, there have only been two mixups:

    1. I chose the wrong account when making a trade. This mixup was entirely my fault.
    2. The funds for my wife's rollover IRA were put into her Roth instead. This one was SureTrade's fault. As soon as I pointed it out to them, however, they got the money transferred to the correct account. And since they pay interest on cash balances, the money was still getting a slight return during the time it took to get it correctly applied.

    I can't say that SureTrade is better than the others, since I've never tried the others. But I can say that I have absolutely no complaints about SureTrade!

  • I was going to ditch E*Trade after the whole RedHat fiasco, but I've kept it. I bought a bunch of other securities through them, and the interface isn't bad.

    I actually use a combination of sites to choose stocks. my.yahoo.com has a great protfolio manager, better than E*Trades. And while yahoo's discussion groups have a lot of static, there's more there than on E*Trade's. Same with news. Once I have something picked, I go to E*Trade, get a realtime quote, then decide if I want to buy/sell.
  • I have been using Datek http://www.datek.com for a few years, and they have $9.95 trades, and had 60 secs trades, or the trade was free.

    I had a lot of fun daytrading, and paid them lots of money. $10 * 25 trades a day is a lot out of $2000. They also have a good interest rate for cash deposits, as well as a good rate for your margin account.

    I am living in Denmark, and that haven't caused me any problems.

    I can recommend them. They were the first to have unlimited free real-time quotes. And now they even allow after-hours trading! That can be important as a way to get out of stocks after the 4PM press release declaring a large deficit.

    And Datek is provbably the only one online broker that did not have capacity problems on the most busy days the last few years. And that is important. You can lose more money not being able to sell than you are prepared for.
  • Having seen the most uneducated "recommendations" on Slashdot every time there is a financial-related article, I really wouldn't trust geeks on this matter... :)

    Gomez Advisors [gomez.com] has previously had pretty good comparisons between brokers. I see they have changed their interface and added more advertising and "deals" crap, I hope the content isn't affected.

    I myself use Datek, as they have been in web brokerage business the longest and have good prices ($9.95). Still, I think that is far too much for doing the trade as the actual costs of the transaction are just a few cents. I guess the real discount brokerage where trades cost less than a dollar is still in the future.

    Also, what I think the U.S. stock market needs is a working wire transfer system. In Finland, for example, you don't actually have "an account" where you store your money at the broker's - you pay the trades after the transaction has been completed via wire transfer. Here you can transfer money between different banks' accounts just with the account number, no bank addresses/ABA numbers or anything needed. Private persons pay their bills from their homes using the bank web interface. No one uses checks here, actually they are no longer accepted currency at all.

  • I use ETrade, and have found their site very informative and helpful, however their customer service is somewhat lacking. But for only $20 a trade, I won't complain too much :)
  • First, do not listen to those who say that since you're inexperienced you should pay $200/trade to speak with investment advisers on the phone and place trades through them. Instead, spend a week and read some books ("A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel is great, believe me), after that you will have enough knownledge (but not experience, which comes only with time).

    Now, as for choosing the best site. If you want to do day-trading, I do not know what to tell you; I've never done it extensively. For other purposes they are all pretty much the same, so I use Datek - it's $10 per trade, cheaper than other "brand-name" sites. I know some people don't like it, but I did not have any problems, and sometimes they give me trades for free (when it takes them >1 minute to execute). The drawback is that you can not trade options on Datek, but I guess you won't be trading them yet anyway.

    Good luck!

    -m
  • I have had good experiences with TD Waterhouse at www.waterhouse.com. They offer $12 trades online, $35 for touch tone service and $45 with broker up to 5000 shares per trade.

  • Online you pay $10-$30 for a trade, locally you pay $100 for a trade. Online you have no help, noone with expirence. Locally you can talk to someone with expirence.

    Unfortunatly most local brokers are just phone slaves who want to sell you something to make money. There are some good ones who really care.

    I only recomend these because it APPEARS that you know nothing about investment, other then you have a lot of money. The stock market can be worse then Vegas for turning a lot of money into a little. The current market allows many people to make a lot of money, but history shows that other markets like this often have the bottom drop out and you lose all the gains very quickly. That isn't to say that stocks are bad investments (something that only history can show conclusively) Only that you need to do a lot of homework before you invest.

    That said, I have accounts with E*Trade and Morgan STanley Dean Wetter. The latter charges way too much, and I'm planning to get away from them in the future. I don't have much expirence trading either though, we are after all talking about my money, but once it hits the stock market it is subject to lots of pressures I have little control over.

  • Though I admit that it is at least partially my fault.

    I don't mean that you should use the expensive local guys. However you should check them out. If you make one trade a year or less, they are not very expensive and the advice can be worth it. (can of course) If you make many trades it isn't worth it, but day-trading is a very dangerious move, and you should really follow the stock market for a long time before you do it.

    There are many books on investing. I've seen criticisms of all of them, though some are overall good books and some are not. (even by the same autheors some books may be bad advice while others good) If your only going to read a few books, I'd recomend something by Benjiman Gramms. (I think he wrote his last book in the '30s though I could be wrong) His mythods are amoung the few that have stood the test of time. Warrent Buffet is one of his students, and also one of the richest investors in the country.

    In the end, it is your money, and you CAN lose it all. I cringe when I hear of a good geek who thinks that because he is smart he should be able to make money in the stock market. While there is money to be made, there is also money to be lost. (while the indexs are up, the average stock lost money last year) Picking the winners isn't easy. Unfortunatly some investors are stupid, and pay outragious prices for bad stocks while letting good stocks lag. (sometimes they should lag) In the end you have to predict not just what intellegent people will do in the market, but also what the idiots will do.

    I won't even get into options, shorts and other trades that reflect (and perhaps change) this price of a stock while allowing you to make money on the downside of a stock with completely different risks.

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