First Trading Experience with Zecco
Jun 02, 2007 
Sun
A week after I opened a Zecco Trading account (check out my Zecco review post for details on account opening process) and initiated an ACH fund transfer, the money finally came through and I got the chance to make my first trading with Zecco.
I requested an ACH transfer of $1,000 last Friday evening from my Bank of America checking account to Zecco. But since it was quite late when I made the request, I was told that it will be reviewed the next business day, this Tuesday. Though Zecco says it usually take about 2 business days to clear the ACH, my transfer used twice as much time to complete.
The trading interface is shown in the above picture (click to enlarge). Honestly, this is probably the simplest interface I have ever used (so far I have used Scottrade, Firstrade, ShareBuilder, and Fidelity and all are much better than Zecco in terms of providing an user friendly trading interface). Even the stock chart looks very amateur (they offer Advanced Chart option, but it’s from BigCharts.com instead of their own). Well, to me, as long as they get the job done, I don’t care too much about how its appearance.
The stock I want to buy is Xinhua Finance Media (XFML), which was hit hard recently due to various issues related to whether the company intentionally hided information in their IPO filings. I bought 360 shares of XFML on its IPO day at $11.10 and yesterday the stock was traded below $7. At this level, I hope I could make up some losses by adding more shares.
After entering all the necessary information such as stock symbol, transaction type, quantity, and order type, I can review the order one more time before submitting it for execution.
Then something unexpected happened after I hit the SEND ORDER button. My order was rejected!
At the bottom of the page, it gave me the reason of rejection as “Only orders that liquidate positions are allowed.” Liquidate positions? I am buying not selling, plus I don’t even have a position yet. I can’t believe there’s such a trouble buying a stock (hopefully selling stocks will be easy from what’s happening now 
). After trying a couple of more times and getting exactly the same result, I decided to give Zecco a call to see what caused the problem. All they told me was to log out and re-enter my account and, surprisingly, it worked!
Overall, I wasn’t very impressed by their website and their trading interface, though the order was executed almost instantly (at least for this order) and it was indeed free. I feel that I can use some improvements of their website:
- I am bothered a lot by having to enter my account number every time when I do anything related to ACH.
- It took me 5 days to complete the first ACH transfer, that’s much longer than with other brokerages.
- A gain tracking tool will be convenient.
About the first item, I actually brought it up to the CSR the night before when I called to ask the status of my ACH transfer. The reason he gave me was it’s for security reason. For what security reason? The account number is displayed right there after logging into myZecco account as it is used as user name to enter the trading account. After I complained that it’s not convenient to have to manually enter the account number every time, the CSR sounded inpatient and told me if I have any suggestions on how they should design their website, I should send them an email.
Right, email. Last time I sent an email inquiry about their promotion, nobody ever bothered to reply to me.
Ready to try Zecco? Use the following Zecco promotion codes to open an account and get 10 commission free trades per month:
| Promotion | Description |
| Buy Stocks Online for $0 | Trade stocks for free on Zecco.com, the Free Trading Community. |
| Tread Stocks for Free | 100% free stock trade. Open an account with $2,500 minimum and get 10 trades per month commission free. |
| Free Blogs, Forums & Trade | Why Invest in stocks? Find out at www.zecco.com for free blogs, forums and tread. |
Max: For Zecco, I don’t have a positive experience with them either and the only thing I do like is the commission free trading. Their website is difficult to use and their customer service is pretty bad.
Hello all,
Im about to open a trading account. I need update information con and pro from Zecco. many thanks
On two separate occasions, Zecco charged me margin interest when I had no margin balance. On 3/23/09 I transferred my account to TradeKing. 2 strikes and your out when you mess with my money.
Zecco has now (4/14/09) taken $155 out of my TradeKing account for margin interest. I had NO margin balance with them!!! The last I heard, this is called theft. They use Penson as the clearing agent.
I find it amazing that 3 weeks after transferring my account out of Zecco into TradeKing, Zecco is allowed to do this. I will be contacting the appropriate regulatory agencies as well as my securities attorney if these monies are not restored to my account.
Is there any comparison between Zecco and TDAmeritrade? I am using TDAmeritrade to do my day trading and it works fine so far
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