The Sun's Financial Diary

Since I began to actively use my Zecco account to trade stocks in March, I got myself a task that I don’t want: find a place to store the mail Zecco sent me every time I made a trade. It’s not really a piece of junk mail that I can just throw away, but close [...]

Last week, I wrote about my experience with Scottrade when I was trying to place an order of Visa (V) when the markets opened. The day after that post was published, I got an email from Chris, Chief Marketing Officer of Scottrade, who expressed concern why I had to wait so long before being connected [...]

I knew Zecco offers free dividend reinvestment, the only problem is I don’t know how to set it up. When I logged into my account yesterday, I noticed that there’s a $20 dividend from my investment in Blackstone Group (BX) (not that I appreciate the money given how much the stock has dropped since it’s [...]

After learning that Zecco relaunched its referral program last December, I set up a referral program of my own shortly after. With my program, I promised to share $20 of the $50 bonus Zecco rewards me for each new account I refer to them. In the first 2 weeks after I put up my program, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]