posted
What do you guys think about this broker. I'm considering opening an account. Trades are only 7 bucks. What are the pros and cons to scottrade?
Posts: 64 | From: Farmingville, Ny, USA | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Try doing a search under the general topic for scottrade you will see a ton of stuff
Posts: 3417 | From: Cleveland, Ohio | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
If you're interested in trading pink sheet stocks with Scottrade, stay away. It'll smash you for $23 a trade minimum, and you have to call the orders in.
Even pennies (or any non-pink stock) under $1.00 will cost at least $12-14 or more, depending on how much you buy.
They're service oriented, very polite. When I was lagging one day (back in 2002, which was probably Scottrade's fault) I accidentally sold more Conexant than I meant to. They reversed the trade for me, which was pretty cool.
They do have a decent number of research tools/links, but it's hard to compare what they have compared to what other brokerages have, because this is the only brokerage I've been with. They do have a new service that provides free Level 2 quotes (if you make 10 trades a month) but you have to have 25,000 bucks in your account.
You only need $500 to open an account. Like you mentioned, market orders are $7.
Another thing I like is that Scottrade doesnt kick you in the nuts if you commit a Free Ride Violation (although I havent had to take advantage of this yet). You get your cash back and just have to deposit enough funds to cover your original trade before the 3 days are up.
In regards to other brokerages...
If you have $5000 and 2 years of stock experience, I think you can open a Freetrades account (a division of Ameritrade), but you only get email support. Something like 20 commission-free trades a month...beyond that I dont know much about them. Ameritrade I think is $10.99 per trade, period -- but dont quote me on that. Anything else I dont know much about at all. There's a few others that people use here that I havent mentioned that are relatively popular.
[This message has been edited by Phoenixx (edited December 01, 2004).]
posted
I'm not looking to trade pennies and don't have enough for an ameritrade account. Looks like scottrade is best for me?
Posts: 64 | From: Farmingville, Ny, USA | Registered: Nov 2004
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You want to be careful with the 7 dollar trades. That is basically only if you buy and sell stocks without placing limits on your orders. As long as you are trading Major listed stocks (NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, etc) it works good and your trades go through very close to what it shows on the streamers. However if you trade non major listed stocks (Pinks, OtherOTC, , some AMEX, etc.) you could get buys and sells for a big difference in price and trust me it won't be in your favor. I found this out the hard way. One of my stocks was sold for .43 cents a share and the bid/ask was around .60 cents a share. This was a AMEX stock at that. That was the last time I did that.
If you put limit orders on the Major listed stocks than it will cost you 12 dollars and not the 7 dollars that they are so proud of. Like Phoenixx said they are very good people to deal with.
Also, If you are thinking of going with Lowtrades, I would suggest staying away from them. Not a very good platform for trading and half the time you can't make the trades you want on the Main trading platform and need to go to another section to place orders. Not good when you are trying to make a quick trade befor price movement.
posted
Yeah, what Steve is referring to here is: dont trade volatile stocks with market orders. For example, if a stock is fast moving and you place a market order to buy 1000 shares when the price is near $1.00 you could end up buying 500 shares at $1.00, 200 shares at $1.10, 300 shares at $1.35, etc. You'll only pay one commission, but you certainly wont get the price you want.
Posts: 0 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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To sum them up, they have very few reporting requirements, if any at all. Basically one step down from penny stocks. Not all of them are bad, but that's where you're going to find a lot of bad companies -- although there are plenty of penny stocks just as bad.
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