The 7 Best Sites For Trading Stocks Online
The myriad of online brokerage sites can make it difficult for a trader to choose which site to use for trading stocks online. There’re tons of factors to consider when choosing an online broker: What features do they offer? What do they allow you to trade? What is their minimum deposit, and of course, what are their fees?
It’s tough to decide with so many choices, so I’ve put together a brief review of my top seven choices for trading stocks online:
Scottrade is one of my favorite online brokers for trading stocks online. They have great prices all around at only $7 for market and limit orders and options are only $7 + $1.25 per contract.
Scottrade also offers free streaming quotes and has no inactivity or maintenance fees and they only require a $500 initial deposit to get started.
With market and limit orders costing $9.95 per trade and options costing $9.95 + $1 per contract, ShareBuilder is by no means a bargain for the frequent trader, but that’s not what ShareBuilder is all about.
ShareBuilder has no minimum and allows you to have a diversified portfolio with very little money. For example, let’s say you have 10 stocks you’d like to invest that would usually cost around $25,000 for you to be properly diversified but you can only spare $200 a month. ShareBuilder will automatically invest that $200 a month for you and spread in out to the stocks you choose. It will even buy fractions of a share to keep your asset allocation plan in line and they only charge $4 for automatic investment trades (you can lower the price if you’re planning on investing more frequently by using one of their monthly fee services).
ShareBuilder is right choice for anyone who is using a buy and hold strategy of trading stocks for the long term.
I figured Etrade deserved a nod here. They have a range of incredible services (for a fee) and they have very competitive rates (if you’re an active trader with over $50,000 in your account). Their margins also get down to as low as 4.24% (if you’re trading with over a million dollars).
Etrade is a great choice for the professional (and obscenely successful) trader. However for the majority of people, Etrade’s rates aren’t competitive with other options for online stock trading. Still, for the affluent professional trader Etrade is far and away the best option on the net.
While they only offer the most basic stock analysis options for free, Zecco does offer stock trades for only $4.50 per trade and if you have at least $2,500 in you account (there’s no minimum to open) you get your first 10 trades free! In addition, option trades are only $4.50 +$0.50 per contract. Zecco also offers some great free tools to screen and execute complex option strategies making this site a great choice if options are an important facet of your online stock trading strategy.
Marsco offers an impressively low $3.95 per stock trade for an unlimited number of shares and $3.95 +$1.25 per contract for option trades with no inactivity fees. They offer streaming quotes and a couple other basic services and they require a relatively hefty $2,500 to open an account.
Trade King offers many more free research tools than your average deep discount broker in addition to their admirably low trading fees: $4.95 stock trades (even for broker assisted trades!) and $4.95 + $0.65 per contract for option trades. The cheap broker assisted trades alone Trade King a great choice for trading stocks online.
Options Xpress may not be the cheapest option on the web, but it is definitely the most comprehensive. With this site, you can trade stocks, options, futures, or even options on futures. It truly is a on stop shop for online trading.
Their pricing structure is depends heavily on how much you trade, so rather than list everything in this article, you can just click here to check out their commissions.
There’s a lot of options for trading stocks online. Above are just a few of my favorites. Check them out and good luck in your trading!
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May 19th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Very useful article for the people who are in stock market business. Before you invest any money in the stock market, you will need to dedicate some time for educating yourself on the different aspects of the stock business. People think making money trading is easy. Why? It’s one the most difficult careers one can choose.