Zecco Increases Min Balance For Free Trading To $25k
Posted January 30, 2009 by Chuck
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Personal Finance
Personal Finance
Sad news from my favorite free online brokerage. While their homepage is still touting free trades for balances of $2,500, once I logged into my account the following information appeared.
Effective March 1, 2009, you will need to a $25,000 balance to get your 10 free trades with Zecco. Otherwise they will credit 10 free trades for every 25 trades.
At only $4.50 per trade under this balance, Zecco is still pretty cheap in the land of online brokerages. But its hard to go up from free.
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wtf are they doing ??????????
Isaac – I agree with the account opening process… it was the most painful one I have ever experienced.
However, you don’t have to have $25,000 in cash sitting in your account. The 25k is your total account balance – stock value and cash.
But yea, everything I originally opened the account for and went through the pains for seems to be slowly going away. It may be time to consider a new brokerage.
Also to note, if a person has $25000 dollars to just have lying around in their account (In addition to money that they have left to invest in stocks), I don’t think that they are all that worried about broker fees too much since it’s very minor compared to their total cash on hand. This just hurts the newer people coming in so I doubt I will stick around here long. The company progressively keeps taking away all the reasons that people would even consider using them. Used to be 40 free trades a month with no minimum, then they made the minimum 2500, now 25k.
The fact that they also charge 2 dollars for stockholder letters is also rediculous. I get free electronic shareholder documents emailed to me from sharebuilder and thats with 1 dollar trades on tuesdays with the advantage account. $20 per month makes all automatic investment trades 2 dollars per transaction which for me is awesome since I can buy fractional shares in 20+ dividend bearing stocks while retaining the quartly dividend from each of them (Also has free dividend reinvestment)
Yeah, with all the issues I’ve heard about their site quality, i wouldn’t trust handing them even $2500. I am having issues with all the steps that have to manually be setup when other brokers handle it all automatically. I never had to mail-in a written customer agreement when I opened my sharebuilder account…