Zecco Review, Promotion Codes Plus Free Trading Account Opening Process

Well, I eventually opened a Zecco account after mulling the idea of getting commission free trading for a long time. The main attraction is, of course, zero commission trading. Currently, I am paying anywhere from $4 to $7 commission on stock trading. It would be nice to eliminate the trading cost. However, my concern is that I am not very confident that they can maintain their fee structure. In the past, I have gone through the process of selling my holdings when the brokerage changed policy and started to charge fees. I don’t want to do that again should Zecco later abandon the zero-commission policy. Plus, I only trade several times in a year now, so the savings on fees aren’t very appealing.

There are two reasons that made me change my mind. First, I want to drop my account at Sharebuilder.com with which I buy $100 of PowerShares Dividend Archiever (PFM) every month and pay $4 for each trading ($3 after Costco rebate). That’s 3% extra cost that is not doing me any good and moving my Sharebuilder account to Zecco can low the overall cost. Second, I have seen recently some other bloggers share their experience about Zecco and it turned out to be quite positive. Thus, I also want to give it a try. But my concerns still remain, so I will only use Zecco as a supplemental account while keeping Scottrade as my primary brokerage.

Last Thursday night, I pulled the trigger and opened a Zecco account. The online application process is quite straightforward and, as they stated, it was done all online without involving any paperwork. To get a Zecco account, I first had to register a myZecco account, which has nothing to do with trading, but will allow me to participate their blog and forum discussions. The registration took only a minute and once myZecco account is active, I can proceed to trading account application.

During the application, I had a chance to select what type of account I want.

Currently, Zecco offers personal accounts (individual or joint account) as well as retirement accounts (Traditional, Roth, or Rollover IRA). This is my personal account, so I chose Joint Account. The reset of the application was rather routine. I was asked for information such as name, address, SSN, employment, income, investment purpose, investable assets amount, and bank, etc. One thing that I felt not necessary was Trading Experience question (left). Since I never traded Options and Commodities, I left them unchanged when I made the selection. But it appeared I have to choose an answer regardless whether I have the experience or not, otherwise, it will give me an error. But it wasn’t a major issue.

At the end of the application, I was asked to sign electronically, therefore, no paperwork necessary.

After the application was completed, I was told that the system will generate an account number for me before I can access my account, and it could take from a few moments to up to 3 hours. The waiting was about an hour and the account appeared in the Trading login field. Then I used an initial password (”Trading Key” as they call it) to log into my account.

The first thing I did was to setup an external ACH account so I can transfer money to Zecco and make trades and this is what I found the most inconvenient part. The following is a screenshot of the interface on how to setup (and check the status of) an ACH account.

To initiate the process, I had to use the Request Now button, which is fine. But the For Account filed is empty and I had to type in my account number manually. And later on, every time I want to check the status of my account, I have to enter the account number. So you either have to memorize the account number or write it down so you can refer to it. What’s worse, since I already logged in, I couldn’t find my account number on the page and had to logged out and write the account number on a piece of paper and started all over again. I mean, this is the only account with Zecco, what’s the meaning of asking me to enter my account number every time? Would it be convenient to just display the account number once logged in or provide a drop down menu to let the user make selections if there are multiple accounts?

Anyway, I requested an external ACH link to my checking account and the next day, I was able to verify two small deposits and proceed with fund transfer, which will be done tomorrow. My first transfer was $1,000. Though I was told by Zecco that their $1,000-minimum promotion has expired, a reader has informed me last week the he was still able to open an account and funded it with $1,000. I will have to wait to see if my transfer is successful. There was no mention of account minimum throughout the process, though.

Overall, the account application process was quite simple, but it doesn’t mean it is convenient or easy to use. Above is a picture of the main interface of my Zecco account, Trading Center (click to enlarge). Though it pretty much has all the functions that I need, I have say that the interface is not very impressive. Maybe it’s because right now I don’t have any position, so I can’t fully explore all the functionalities it has to offer. I will have the chance to test it once the account is funded.

Ready to try Zecco? Use the following Zecco promotion codes:

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