Friday, May 6, 2011

New Low Cost Broker

I like a low cost online broker and I don't need a lot of bells and whistles. I typically make less than 10 stock trades a month. I have had a brokerage account with with Zecco for several years now and have enjoyed 10 free trades a month. Zecco no longer offers free trades and now charges $4.95 a trade. Time to look for another broker.

I looked at Barron's and SmartMoney broker ratings for 2010 to find a new discount online broker. I came up with Just2Trade for my new brokerage firm. Just2Trade offers stock trades for $2.50 and $.50 per option contract. SmartMoney 2010 Broker Survey rates Just2Trade 9 out of 17 in the Discount Broker ratings.

Here is what Barron's has to say about them:
Just2Trade (www.just2trade.com)
Pros: Very low costs with little in the way to clutter up your experience. J2Trader, a streaming platform, is free to all customers. A powerful technical analysis pattern-recognition feature, Recognia's Technical Event Stock Screener, is included here. Adding capabilities to the site this year that will help in the rankings next year.
Cons: Execution engine is rather low-tech. Limited complex options capability.

Recently with the market run up, my Vanguard accounts are now over $500K. Vanguard offers Voyager Select Service for accounts with $500K to $1M. Part of this service benefit is $2 stock trades with Vanguard Brokerage. With the $2 stock trades and the majority of my assets at Vanguard, switching to Vanguard Brokerage makes a lot of sense for me. So now with $2 stock trades from Vanguard, they now win out over Just2Trade. I will be moving my stocks from Zecco to Vanguard during the month of May.




1 comments:

me myself and I said...

I was going to ask you what you were going to do after Zecco raised their fee. It seems you have decided the exact same steps as me. I am just waiting to get to the $500k mark :(