Scottrade for pin money for a year or two, but I didn't trade enough to warrant keeping the account. Schwab for 8 years or so, but things were too complicated trying to use Schwab Bank and Schwab for brokerage and IRA accounts. The Gold card and moving money around was a pain when paying bills or buying stock. Fidelity is my home now. Easy to use, calm, cool and collected. No muss, no fuss and I have immediate access to everything financial via the smartphone whether we are home or away. My tax guy finds the Fidelity statements the easiest of the bunch to extract and shovel data into the federal and state forms.
Just a quick note to day traders not to overlook the spread cost. Many brokers will give you very attractive monthly fees and other commission breaks, only to find that you're having to trade a massive spread which will actually not only eat up your profit long-term, but make individual trades much more tricky. I fell for this mistake early on - in fact I didn't even know that the spread value could vary between brokers until someone told me!
Am I the only one expecting Robin Hood to come to Europe? The fees here are ridiculously high: 0,65% of every order in average, which is extremely high if you ask me, not to say that most of the brokers in my country don't give free trades or bonuses.
One should select an online broker with discretion with an eye of what they want to achieve in the stock market. The online brokerage account you use will have a big impact on your expenses and trading capabilities. My favourites are Option House and Ameritrade. They offer strong customer support and advanced trading platforms with no balance or trade minimums and research. Though their commissions are on the higher side, the cost is worth.
I don't consider that to be such a high fee. As you see here a lot of the brokers are charging between $5 and $10 per trade, resulting in pretty high percentages if you are investing smaller amounts. I'm not sure how these brokers work but usually the fee stated is the minimum fee and it will be higher if you trade in larger amounts. Say you have $1000 extra per month to invest, if you split that into 2 stocks at $5 per trade you'll be looking at 1% fee. Personally I'm with IB where the trades are roughly $0.5 per trade but it comes at the expense of a $10 monthly minimum until you reach 200k in your account. It's still ridiculously cheap, especially if you are trading a lot. For the long term investors (like me) it's not THAT useful but still much better than paying those larger fees for every trade.
Really, trading is not easy and i lost a great deal of money to brokers. One day i uncovered a lot of nice comments about how remarkable Mr Bart Kasch is online and decided to contact him. We started working together and in the end i got back my $1.2m. I recommend him if you need a recovery agent you can trust for results. Reach him at [email protected]
I use Forexchief for now, especially because I was able to verify their license and their regulation status with the various bodies. And for the fact that they have wide range of trading instruments; including forex, crypto, stock, metals and lots more with very good rates. But coming to that decision was not easy after so many failures in the past, I hope things continue to work smoothly with them.
I like when traders go extra miles to verify brokers, because we can't be too careful in the market as scammers abound everyday. I trade with them too and did same thing, but what gave me that push from them was what I found out, that the company undergoes a mandatory annual financial audit. Many don't know but his is so important because these audits helps to give an opinion regarding the financial health of a company thereby reducing the chances of fraud and also controls misappropriation of assets by the business. So if Foexchief have been doing this for more than 8 years now and remained in business, it definitely says a lot about, when I saw this the decision became easy for me.
You know really thought about from this angle, this really is a vital observation. This is the reason why they are so transparent, especially the fact that they use STP/NDD tech which makes them not to interfere with the execution of financial operations to withdraw funds.
I agree, especially their execution speed is wonderful, you have the confidence that your trades will be executed when appropriate.
