The Sun's Financial Diary

This is what competition is about. Early last month, Charles Schwab reduced the commission for online equity trading to $8.95 per trade from the original price of $12.95. The move, as an recent article on Barron’s noted, could trigger a new price war in online trading. Now, there’s a strong evidence that the war may [...]

ChoiceTrade, headquartered in Central New Jersey, is another online discount broker which offers stock and options trading at a discounted price (ChoiceTrade is one of the discount brokers highlighted in my discount broker comparison post). The current trading commission at ChoiceTrade is $5 per online stock trade with no limit on the size of the [...]

Online stock broker Charles Schwab announced today that it is reducing commission for online equity trades. Starting January 19th, Schwab customers will pay a flat $8.95 commission for each online stock trade, regardless the number of shares. The current commission schedule charges $12.95 per stock or ETF (exchange-traded fund) trade if the customer trades less than [...]

OptionsHouse in an online discount broker which offers investors a wide range of products and services at competitive prices. I first knew the broker in April, then opened an account for myself in June (a $1,000 account minimum is required) and made a couple of trades. The reason I wanted to trade with OptionsHouse was [...]

This is the third segment of the broker trading platform review series. So far I have covered Scottrade and Firstrade. Today, I am going to take a look at another online broker, optionsXpress. I mentioned early that, though I have an account with optionsXpress for nearly 2 years, I didn’t make any trades with optionsXpress [...]

Looks like online brokers are running a lot of promotions these days to attract new customers. SogoTrade is offering 100 commission free trades for every new customer. It’s quite easy to get the free trades: Open a SogoTrade account; fund the account with $500; receive the bonus. There is a restriction on the free trades [...]

When E*Trade launched its global trading platform in 2007, I saw it as an opportunity to finally be able to buy some internationals stocks that are not otherwise available to retail investors in the U.S. At that time, Chinese stocks were as hot as they could be and buying Chinese stocks seemed to be the [...]

As you may know, discount broker OptionsHouse is currently running a promotion which gives 100 commission free trades for every new customer with $3,000 deposit.  This is a good deal if you can get the most out of the offer, even though trading 100 times in 2 months (the free trades will expire 60 days [...]