The Sun's Financial Diary

I have followed SmartMoney Maganize’s annual survey of online discount stock brokers for some time, writing the first post about the survey in 2009. In the past, when I looked at the ranking of best and worst brokers, there were always some surprises, especially when brokers I have never heard of were thrown in the [...]

From what I heard, it will be coming this fall. I have been a loyal Scottrade customer for nearly 10 years. During this time, I have opened trading accounts with multiple brokers, each of which has its own services and features, but Scottrade has always been my primary broker for most of the trades I [...]

It has been some time since I last wrote about Zecco. The reason is that I don’t use Zecco a lot these days as I used to in the past after it dropped the commission free trades last year, making it the same as any other discount brokers. But I still have an active account [...]

This Friday, August 12th, online discount broker TradeKing will offer its customers commission free trades for any and all trades placed during the days. If you want to take advantage of the recent sharp drops on the Wall Street, not that that’s a good thing unless you consider it as a good buying opportunity, you can [...]

Online discount broker Options House is running a new promotion that will give each new customer a Dell high performance monitor for free with a new account that’s funded for at least $5,000. The promotion runs from now to July 31, 2011. During the promotional period, if you open a new Options House brokerage account [...]

Are you an optionsXpress customer? If you are, then you probably have already heard the news coming out yesterday that optionsXpress is to be bought by Charles Schwab for $1 billion. I opened an optionsXpress account a few years ago when they gave $100 for a new account (you can still get $100 bonus now [...]

Got this promotion offer from ShareBuilder a couple of days ago. Discount broker ShareBuilder is now offering 10 free real-time trades if you open a ShareBuilder IRA account, whether it’s Traditional or Roth. If you are not familiar with ShareBuilder, which is now part of ING Direct, here’s what you will get. It basically offers [...]

When something seems too good to be true, it probably either is or won’t last long in case it is true. And what happened to Zecco Trading in the past few years just serves as a perfect example. Zecco, an online discount broker whose name stands for ZEro Commission COst, started in 2006 by offering its customer [...]