Just taking a poll: What brokerage is preferred for CFA charterholders/candidates??
Ask Frank.
i prefer TD Waterhouse. if i had 1 million dollars, i wouldn’t trust any of those smaller brokerages. with my money here, i know its safe.
You mean TDAmeritrade?
Interactive brokers is the best imho. I also use Fidelity and Merrill. Fidelity has great services & ok research. I no longer have a checking account because of fidelity. The fidelity atm card works great overseas. Merrill Lynch direct has $29 trades and good research… something you don’t get from a discount broker. TdAmeritrade has crap research and their trades cost more than interactive brokers.
i’ve been a td waterhouse customer in canada for a few years and am relatively happy. i had thought of moving over to e*trade canada but after the recent issues in the U.S. i think i will stay put.
From what I’ve read in various places, TD seems to be the best.
Interactive Brokers looks great, but you have to have executed at least 100 trades in whatever type of securities you want to be able to trade in order to use it. For stocks I think that’s not a big issue, but if I want to practice some of the option and future strategies I’ve been studying, it can be an issue. (I realize that options and futures can have all that embedded leverage and can be pretty risky, but you gotta start somewhere, and if you are self controlled and use low-risk strategies like covered calls, it shouldn’t be too bad) Now, I’m sure this is all legal butt-covering from the IB folks, and they don’t really care all that much if you just lie and say you did it. But, if you’re a CFA candidate or charterholder, you’re not supposed to lie about things (actually, you’re not supposed to lie about things anyway, but that’s another issue ;-). I’m thinking of maybe going over to Hedge Street which allows you to trade inexpensive futures on small nominal values and digital options to build up the necessary number of trades.
Everybody is doing it so it is ok.
Thats what they told me about all these securitized loans they gave me. 