The Sun's Financial Diary

I am currently using several brokerage accounts and each of them has its own *unique* features. For example, I use Firstrade for stocks that pays dividend (such as MO), but it charges $6.95 per trade, E-Trade for stocks listed in Hong Kong, and QQQDirect to buy QQQQ without commission (find out more in my brokerage [...]

It seems to me that Zecco doesn’t have a clear plan on how to run their business.
First, they asked a ton of paperwork to open an account, then ran a promotion with a lowered minimum requirement that didn’t want anybody to know, shortly after the secret promotion, they decided to get rid of all the [...]

I have been considering an E-Trade Global Trading account for quite some time. I thought it’s a good idea to invest directly into foreign markets, in addition to buying ADRs that are listed on US markets. What held me back is the high cost of trading foreign stocks.
However, I still want to try that program [...]

But not with a price, a very high price.
Back in February when I first heard that E-Trade is going to introduce a global trading service to allow investors to trade stocks listed in other markets directly, I signed up to receive notification when it becomes available. Yesterday, the email came, announcing that the new E-Trade [...]

The whole process took less time than I expected.
An email from ShareBuilder arrived yesterday, informing me that a check has been issue to me. Since I didn’t make any withdraw request myself, it could only be part of the account transfer process. So I logged in to my Zecco free trading account and was quite [...]

One of the problems I have with ShareBuilder, also one of the reasons I decided to leave ShareBuilder, is its lack of flexibility when it comes to choosing when to invest and how to invest. For instance, at the time when I joined the program, I could only select to invest on the first [...]

Just as I was about to abandon the idea of transferring my ShareBuilder account to Zecco* (Zecco asked me to resubmit the account transfer form, which I didn’t do), the process made a dramatic turn yesterday and now it seems that things are pressing ahead as they should be.
A trade confirmation email from ShareBuilder [...]

To me, things never went well when transferring an account. It took me two months to transfer my Roth IRA from Scottrade to Vanguard last time because of various errors at both Scottrade and Vanguard. Now the same problem is happening again with Zecco.
Yesterday, I got an alert from ShareBuilder, saying there’s an important message [...]

When I was in the process of getting a Zecco trading account a couple of weeks ago, it really surprised me when Zecco took back the two small trial deposits from my checking account after the account verification process was completed. The total of 40 cents was nothing, but the action itself speaks more than [...]

Last week I posted an entry on transferring my account at ShareBuilder to Zecco. After the post was published, I got an email from Drew who is interested in some more information about the transfer:
I enjoyed your current posts on Zecco and moving from ShareBuilder to Zecco. I currently have a portfolio with ShareBuilder but [...]