I’ve never owned any stocks directly, but would like to set up an online account to do some trading and investing. I live overseas but have a US address, SSN and US bank account so I gather I can just apply online, do a direct withdrawal to fund my trading account and that’s it?
Who should I use? I am considering etrade.com. Any comments/suggestions on this?
I plan to have $10,000-ish to work with and plan to mostly buy individual stocks. I don’t plan to do any “day trading” but will hold them for 3-12 months probably.
I am looking for low fees (obviously), ease of use and solid/stable company to work with.
I use eTrade and have had no problems at all. They execute transactions when they say they will and you can manage your account with automated stop losses, etc.
If you’re military, you might look at USAA.com - they have pretty much the same services, and I think they are a little cheaper. I am migrating my accounts over there from eTrade, just to get them all in one place.
If you are new to trading securities, you will want to be carefull with individual stocks.
My advice (I am not a stockbroker, just a casual investor) would be to look at Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that are based on Indexes.
For example Barclays iShares has a Dow Jones Industrial ETF. I think the symbol is NY. It roughly tracks the DJ100 but unlike a mutual fund, you can trade it in real time not at the end of the day. And since it trades like a stock, the only fees are the brokers.
There are tons of Indexed ETFs. China is hot now as is Brazil and other emerging markets.
USAA.com is interesting. I am not in the military but my dad was and I get my insurance through them. As to individual stocks, yup. There are two I’d like to buy… companies that I know well, and possibly look at ETFs for additional funds. Which account type do I want at eTrade… I assume their normal “Trading and Investing”?
We have Tdameritrade. I am very happy with them. The website is very easy to understand. For basic financial advice I highly recommend www.fool.com, the website of the motley fool. The MF is not a stock trading site but a website with lots of great tips about the market for anyone new to the market or just looking to make more sense of it.
I’ve had both E-Trade and Ameritrade. Half a dozen of one, 6 of the other. ETrade has a cleaner interface, and you can save a longer watch list of stocks (But for you, that shouldn’t matter) But ETrade also chased me away by their customer service when I had a problem. I’m sure Ameritrade is the same, I just haven’t had to call customer service yet. I’ve been luckier with Ameritrade
And I’d like to echo what Quartz said. Have a very secure password. Never follow a link to the broker, enter it manually in a new window every time. They NEVER email you asking you to update your information, that is always a scam.
Brokerage accounts are the new targets of the scammers. And they are not FDIC insured, so if you get scammed, the money is gone forever.
I also have TDAmeritrade. I love their simplified fee structure compared to E*Trade, circa 2002.
TDAmeritrade has, however, had a fairly significant-sounding security breach a few weeks ago (some Googling should turn it up easily enough), so that might be something you want to consider.
As far as stock advice goes, I’ll second Fool.com. I’ll also note that for tax purposes, you may want to hold onto your stocks (the gainers at least) for 366 days or longer. (Details.)
Best of luck! (And let there be no doubt that luck helps!)
I’ve used Scottrade in the past and have been pretty satisfied with them. $7 a trade and a pretty decent interface for making orders and for doing research/screening on stocks.
Fidelity has excellent access to stock research and their website is (to me anyway) easy to use. They are not, however, cheap (their rates are based on how much you’ve got invested - people who have larger amounts of money have lower rates, and with 10,000 you’d be paying about 20 bucks a trade). Also if you invest in non-Fidelity mutual funds, their fees are large - I thought about purchasing a Vanguard fund in my fidelity account and the fee was 75 dollars. Ouch.
If you do go for mutual funds, Vanguard is supposed to have low fees. And I’m presuming you could also purchase stocks directly through Vanguard. Anyone know if you can buy mutual funds (Vanguard, Fidelity or others) through an eTrade or Ameritrade account?
Actually I think you can sign up for a free month of access to Fidelity’s stock research even if you don’t have an account with them (I have access to it because we have accounts there).
Oh - as far as opening an account: when we opened up accounts a couple of years ago, I had to enter our driver’s license numbers. I guess they ran them against a datanase or something. It also took a couple of days to get the bank account linkages set up so we could directly transfer funds from bank to Fidelity. After that we could do send funds on the fly. I’m guessing the other places would be similar re ID requirements and time to set up the transfer info.
I buy Vangurd ETFs through my TD Ameritrade account.
Three ETFs to be aware of:
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[li]VTI = Total Stock Market[/li][li]VEU = All World Stock Market, excluding US equities[/li][li]BND = Total Bond Market[/li][/ol]
Vanguard also has a very nice “Vanguard Die-Hard” webboard. I’ve learned plenty from that forum.
