This is probably a really obvious question, but I don’t have any experience in doing this. I have an E-Trade account, and own some stock as well as having a cash balance. I just got an email from E-Trade saying that they will start charging a maintenance fee unless I keep a pretty high balance in the account. I’d rather not have to put any more cash into this account. Can I close it? The problem is that I’m not sure how you would go about transferring the stock to another brokerage. If I sell it and buy it back, I’ll have to pay transaction fees on both ends. Is there another way to do this, or am I pretty much out of luck? Thanks.
Not hard at all. Just go to the new brokerage and open a new account and request that the assets from your E-Trade account be transferred to the new account. Your new broker will give you the transfer order forms. You do not have to sell your stocks in your E-Trade account in order to effect the transfer. The only possible problem you will have is if you own some mutual funds that E-Trade carries, but your new broker does not. Then you will have to sell the E-Trade mutual fund. But stocks should not be problem. And of course, cash is never a problem to transfer.
I believe Ameritrade has no maintenance fees if you have a balance of over $2000. I used to day trade with E-Trade and the fills were horrible as was the customer support. CyberTrader kicks ass!
Thanks. I actually already have an Ameritrade account, so it sounds like I can just transfer everything over to that. I’ll give that a try.