The Sun’s Financial Diary

I took advantage of the $100 bonus offer from OptionsXpress last week and opened an account for myself. The process is quite simple, taking only several minutes to complete. What appeared to be a little bit concern was that when I set up the ACH transfer, it asked me the method to verify my identity, [...]

I have been a loyal customer of Scottrade for more than 5 years. Though I have opened a number of brokerage accounts during that time period, Scottrade remains my primary broker holding most of our investable assets. There are reasons for me to stick with Scottrade (Scottrade 3 free trades offer).
Last week, Scottrade informed me [...]

Good changes are coming to ShareBuilder after ING Direct bought the online discount brokerage firm a month ago.
An email from ShareBuilder over the weekend informed me that starting December 17th, the cost of trading securities at real time at ShareBuilder will be at a flat fee of $9.95 for both market and limit orders. ShareBuilder [...]

I received an email from Zecco yesterday, announcing the re-launch of their Zecco Friend Program. The program is actually a referral program which allows existing Zecco customers to earn cash rewards for recommending the service to friends. Here’s how it works:
As the holiday season approaches, we’re sure you’d appreciate more cash to buy gifts for [...]

So now E-Trade Financial seems out of the immediate danger of going out of business, they want to show their appreciation to those customers who chose to stay with them after the firm revealed big losses from subprime mortgage loans and saw their stock sink more than 50% in one day. An email from E-Trade [...]

As 2007 comes to an conclusion, I make another change of my investment accounts over the weekend when I opened a TradeKing account, which will replace Firstrade as my main stock broker for stocks that pay dividend.
I got the Firstrade account in early 2006, mainly for its free dividend reinvestment feature, one that my primary [...]

An email from ShareBuilder reached my mailbox tonight with some “exciting” announcement: ShareBuilder has been acquired by ING Direct on November 15, 2007. Along with the announcement, ShareBuilder also told its customers what change they can expect after the transaction: none.
Rest assured there have been no changes made to your ShareBuilder account. All of the [...]

As E-Trade’s stock bounced back to $5+ level, it seems the bankruptcy rumor has calmed down a little bit. Actually, instead of going out of business, E-Trade may become a take-over target (that speculation played a big role in driving up the stock price).
Anyway, today I received an email from E-Trade regarding my account with [...]

Another big story yesterday (the other one I thought was the 170+ points reversal of the Dow, extending the index’s losing streak to 4 and closing below 13,000 the first time since late August) was the nearly 60% drop of E-Trade Financial shares. Following a Citigroup analyst downgrade of the stock to Sell over the [...]

Last week, when I went through Kiplinger’s 2007 Best List, one of the surprises to me was their choice of the best online broker for fund investors, which went to Muriel Siebert, a broker that I have never heard of until I read the magazine. Kiplinger gave a brief explanation why this particular broker won [...]