Go!
CFA vs. MBA sounds way more fun.
I use both. We have a brokerage window through Schwab in our 401k and I use Scottrade for my brokerage account and IRA. I can’t compare option trading since you can’t do that in a 401k, but otherwise I like them both. Schwab is a little more user-friendly compared to Scottrade’s more spartan layout. Scottrade does have streaming quotes which is pretty cool.
I’d recommend either of them.
I’m leaning on ACATing my ish to Schwab due to the free ETFs offered, which track Vanguard and iShares well, do not have a trading commission cost, and are a few bps less than both Vanguard and iShares. Sure beats the $7/trade at Scottrade.
I have my stuff at Schwab. The thing I don’t like is the huge ticket charges for many of the mutual funds not on their “one-Source” platform. Thos $50-60 ticket charge hurt unless you are make a $10,000 trade. I don’t think I’d ever purchase any of the Schwab Managed Funds, just out of principle.
^I’m not sure I’d participate in funds not on their platform. I’m a pretty lazy investor and simply want to keep this simple and cheap.
I think the scottrade elite platform is easy to use. No experience with schwab.
USAA
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I used Scottrade at some point because it was the cheapest. Overall experience was satisfactory. It’s not like I needed all kinds of sophisticated functions that I don’t understand completely and that will mislead me into thinking I am making better decisions than I actually am. Of course, this became moot when I joined a company that has severe restrictions on approved brokerage accounts.
Schwab if you want their ETFs. They also offer a bunch of non-Schwab ETFs without a commission, and with artificial DRIP. Especially handy when you want to rebalance by yourself. Those tiny trades would be hurt the most by commissions.
No experience with ScotTrade.
EDIT: having said this, I still pay Schwab’s trading commission to buy and hold actual stocks. Even with their cheapest ETF, you are paying $4 per year per $10K; whereas for stocks you pay $9 (or $7 for 401k) once.
I like Scottrade for my pretty simply Roth IRA. Their flexible reinvestment thing is pretty cool and good since I have dividend paying stuff in there. The $7 trades don’t bother me too much since I don’t make that many transactions.
TD Ameritrade
Looking at this also; been Scottrade forever, but thinking of going Schwab. The problem with Scottrade, aside from the site being clunky and unintuitive, streaming quotes being broken on mac, and them seeming sort of sketchy, is that it’s near impossible to get your money out. Getting money in, easy, getting it out not so much. I’m not even in the country so I don’t want them to send me a freaking check. It’s 2014, why can’t I move money back and forth between my Chase account, online? I don’t wanna call or fax thanks, time zones, fees. Looking at the demos of Schwab “StreetSmart Edge” (douche name) it looks clean and functional. The equity trade fee is insignificantly more, and the free ETFs is a win. If you deposit $50K you get 300 free trades (BUT these expire in 6 months). But can you make transfers out to your bank without a big hassle? Fees?
Edit: well their software “StreetSmart Edge” doesn’t run on mac, but they do have a web/cloud version that is mac friendly.
I use Fidelity to get 2% cash back.
As a Schwab customer, StreetSmart edge is nothing but a gimmick. Its just some charts, graphs and streaming quotes, but is really pointless in the grand scheme of things. Also, streetsmart edge is very clunky and fails frequently. I think it was designed to impress retail investors and make thing fee like that had a great “trading tool” at their hands. The website interface is better and easy to use if the only thing your after is low commission trade execution.
Excellent.
I’m going to give them a try. Probably they have more customers/AUM and thus more money to stay up-to-date. I downloaded their iPhone app and it seems functional so far. Scottrade hasn’t updated any of their stuff since like 2006, it’s the dark ages over there. Also it looks like if you have $100K+ you get a number of free wires per period.
In addition signing up for an ETrade-KR account this week, so I can buy me some Samsung stock…not the creepy grey market stuff.
Haven’t tried scottrade but out of Schwab / Fidelity / Interactive Brokers, IB is the best by far for me.
Fidelity has the best customer service by a mile but not great fills and their supposed real-time quotes are often not accurate (you can check it side by side with IB and the Fidelity data lags by up to a minute). The sources of borrow are surprisingly bad. There are a lot of annoying safe guards in place to prevent idiots from blowing themselves up – that’s good except they can’t be waived, so if you want to do stuff like put your entire account short a sub-$5 penny stock (LOL) you have to go through a bunch of hoops. For some reason it takes f’king forever for the trades to settle too, so if you want to wire money around it can take a week in some cases.
Schwab is terrible in pretty much every way – terrible service, terrible fills, nearly impossible to borrow. Fidelity over Schwab because they’re basically the same but Fidelity sucks less.
IB has great trading software, great fills, very accurate quotes, easy to borrow with real-time borrow data. The customer service is horrible (by far the worst) but if you know what you are doing you probably won’t need to call them anyway. The trading software is very good and the best I have seen for any retail account. Depends on how much trading you do though, it would be overkill for most people.
I have three accounts but if I could only have one, it would be IB.
^ Agree with IB’s terrible customer service. I actually know a security guard that got fired for lack of a work ethic get hired by IB in their call center.
Thanks, I haven’t submitted the Schwab paperwork yet, so will research IB today…didn’t know they existed.
On borrowing…you mean you to have trouble with basic stuff like buying on margin, or on shorting some obscure stock, or what?
LOL, so when Googling this weekend I ended up on the Better Business Bureau site, and was reading some of the complains for kicks. Truly amazing the way some of these idiots are blowing themselves up. Once chump went all-in short on some stock, the thing grew like 6X, evaporated his entire account, plus he owed nearly $100K. Funny stuff…
Schwab is a retail noob platform. There’s nothing wrong with that and it’s a good business (apparently, that dude is a billionaire) but it’s no good for a power user. You can never get borrow. I used to call the borrow desk at Schwab and they knew me by name since apparently only two other people would ever call for locates. As a result, there is really no infrastructure for shorting. I don’t buy on margin so that was never an issue for me. I did find the fills to be crappy though.
People evaporate their accounts all the time in penny stocks, both long and short. The shorting stuff is fairly understandable but I am constantly amazed at what people are willing to invest in on the long side within penny stock land. If it sounds too good to be true, it very likely is. The stock market is a giant tug of war between different interested parties, each of which is hoping to exploit the others. Retail noobs are like chum in the water.