Are you looking to open an online stock broker account and overwhelmed with the number of choices out there? Well, thank your lucky stars! Below is a summary of online stock brokers that I put together to help our Financial Resource community.
Most likely many of you already have an online stock brokerage account, but if you are like me, you may have started an account a while back and continued using the same company and account all these years even though we know there are a lot more options and possibly better ones now. For example, I started an Ameritrade account a little over 10 years ago (the company is now called TD Ameritrade after a merger) and I still have the same account. At that time, my priority was to get the lowest stock trade fee (or lowest commissions). I didn’t care too much for stock analysis and company research, as I used other sites like Yahoo Finance to do most of my research. However, over the last 10 years many things have changed and there are a lot more options out there. Maybe I have been missing out on a lot of new features that could save time and money!
The first point I need to make is that there are many online brokers out there. No one solution fits all, and each of us may have a different need, so I will not be recommending a particular broker to work with. My goal is to summarize my research with the most relevant information to share with our Financial Resource community. This summary can serve as a base to work from or help you to decipher which online broker offers what you need. From there, I highly advise you to research their website, their product and offering, and contact and speak with them, if needed, to get a better feel for what you will get when you open a stock trading account.
The online brokers that I looked at are Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, ShareBuilder, and Charles Schwab. The following is a summary of the key factors that may help you with your decision.
To read more about each of these brokerages in a clear / concise summary and what we discovered, please click on http://www.financialresource.org/blog/online-stock-broker-comparisons-and-reviews/
Happy trading!
About Author
Wealth Builder is an avid fan of the storck market and presently is part of our community at Financial Resource: Your Path to Financial Freedom!
A financial education blog to share experiences on 401K, assets, budgeting, cashflow, early retirement, finance, financial freedom, investing, money management and retirement planning using downloads of free audiobooks or books on tape, posts, podcasts and video.
Join our community in its path to financial freedom by visiting us at http://www.financialresource.org
you must be 18 to open an account PERIOD, that is the Law. You can, however, open up an UGMA (unified gift to minors account) with a parent as a Custodian, and then at a designated age, between 18-25, the account becomes yours. Every brokerage firm can and will set up and account in this manner. Good luck!