E-Trade $500 Apple Gift Card Promotion

Online discount broker E*Trade Securities is currently running a new promotion that will give every new customer a $500 Apple gift card. To qualify for the big gift card plus another 60 days of commission free trading, however, you will need to open an account with at least $150,000, which I believe is too high for small investors to enjoy the promotion. If don’t have that much money to open the account, you may eligible to receive a small gift card at $200 with $75K or more initial deposit.

If you are considering using E-Trade as your stock broker, you need to know how much it’s going to cost you to trade stocks with E-Trade, the only stock broker that I knew back in the dot com era. It isn’t cheap. With E-Trade, the standard commission for trading stocks of ETFs online is $9.99, much higher than what other popular discount broker charge for the same trades. For options, there’s an additional $0.75 per contract.

If you don’t have that amount of money to get the Apple gift card, or you may not even want it, E-Trade also has a few other promotions if you decide to open an account with it:

• Trade free for 60 days with a minimum deposit of $2,000 and get up to $500 depending on your initial deposit amount;
• Get 100 free trade with an E-Trade IRA account plus up to $500 credit depending on the amount of deposit.

To receive cash credits, you will need to deposit new funds or securities from accounts outside of E*Trade. The credit amount will be made as follows: deposits over $250,000 receive $500; deposits between $100,000 and $249,999 receive $250; deposits between $50,000 and $99,999 receive $100; deposits between $25,000 and $49,999 receive $50.