How to buy Stocks

Zecco.com is an online brokerage service that is different from others. You can create a free account at Zecco.com to join the ZeccoShare the free trading community. You can get and share various users’ opinions and learn many important aspects of stock trading. Also see others stock holdings and the return results. It’s really fun. This guy ‘jonathan367’s stock portfolio performed 800% within the last 3 months. That’s amazing. You can view their actual holding statuses too.

Here are the quick overview of Zecco Online Brokerage Service.

Zecco.com provides …

• 10 free trades each month with $25,000 account balance or 25 stock trades per month.
• Generally they charge $4.50 per trade as commission for regular stock trading. While other stock brokers charges $7 or more per trade, this is really cheap.
• Options commission is $4.50 plus $0.50 per contract.
• Mutual Funds fee is $10.00
• There is no account minimum or inactivity fee. Great!

When you open an account

• You need your driver license and the Social Security Number. Do not worry about your private information being submitted. This is a standard procedure for all stock broker or bank account creation steps and all the submission will be done over SSL (Secure Socket Layer 128 bit) , so you don’t have to worry about it.
• There is no minimum deposit amount to open.
• The complete process only takes about 10 to 20 minutes.
• Direct deposit is available. You can provide bank information to transfer money to Zecco from your checking account.
• Do not ever borrow money (Margin account) to trade. There is a high possibility that you may get into trouble when the market is volatile.

Zecco.com also provides online community as I mentioned previously. You can get many valued information such as recommended stock symbol and other stock trading answers by checking out the forum and community.

That was my quick introduction about Zecco. Now I will show you how to buy stocks in Zecco trading platform. I hope you are already signed up with Zecco. Zecco allows you to select userid for the community access. When you first log in to the Zecco website, you will be directed to the main page of the ZeccoShare community. You can check out various articles and recommendation from other active traders.

Main screen after the first login.

If you want to actually start trading, you will need to pass another authorization. First, click on the ‘Trading’ button located on the top right hand corner. It will bring you to a new screen. Trading account number will be automatically displayed but you are required to type in the Trading Key. Trading Key is something like a password to authorize that you are the true owner of the account who can trade. It should have been set during the initial account setup.

Log-in again for actual live stock trading.

Below is the first screen after second log-in. There are lots of important information in the screen . Top of the screen there is a section you can quickly buy or sell stocks. And your account status and equity holding statuses are shown in simple charts so you would know the current status of your stock portfolio right away. ‘Total Account View’ shows the total value of your account with current value of equities and cash. ‘Positions chart shows’ the list of the current stock holdings with the initial purchase prices so you would know if you are wining or loosing. ‘Order Status’ chart will show the submitted buy or sell orders but which are not yet executed.

The first page of Trading Center

Now let’s try to buy a share. With the recent news on portable high tech devices such as iPhone and Droids , I am interested in Apples share. You can use the search tool to find the stock symbol of ‘Apple Inc.’ which is ‘AAPL’ . You can quickly check the current price and the charts of the stock symbol from the simple menu right below the trade order submission box.

Stock quote of Apple Inc ‘AAPL’ symbol

In the above quote screen, ‘AAPL’ was traded at $203.48. But then my buying power is only $137.11. So I am not able to buy even a single stock. So I decided to change my mind and selected Bank of America (BAC) who acquired Merrill Lynch last year. They say that the financial sector is still unstable and but I think BAC is a very good company with high growth potential. I am not just saying this. I really do think so. So the last trading price of BAC was $16.42 and I decided to buy 5 stocks of BAC.

Stock quote of Bank of America ‘BAC’ symbol

Transaction order submission menu

Here are the explanation of each item in the order submission menu.

1. Transaction: Buy , Sell, Short , and Cover. For now , let’s concentrate on Buy and Sell and stay away from the short and cover.

2. Quantity: number of stocks that you would like to buy or sell.

3. Symbol: Symbol of the company that you would like to buy or sell.

4. Order type: Type of the order.

• Market Orders: Market order is an order to buy or sell a stock at its current market price. This type guarantees the order execution but the price may not be guaranteed meaning the price may be significantly higher if demand is strong at the time of the order. Therefore this is little bit risky that price is not guaranteed.
• Limit Orders: Limit orders guarantee you the price but not the execution. You set the price limit to buy or sell. If the current price reaches the limit target price, your order will be executed, but may not be executed if the price does not reach the target within the trading day. (But then you can also set the duration to GTC  – Good till Cancel to make the order request lasts longer.)  I prefer limit order because you have the control over the trading price.
• Stop Orders: This is often used to protect your equities against sudden price drops (which has occurred to the many of the financial stocks on last October 2008). You can set the stop order price. And when the market prices reaches the stop order price, the transaction is executed at the market price. Therefore, the actual trading price may not be the same as stop order. If a stop order is triggered , it guarantees execution but not price.
• Stop Limit Orders: This is the same as stop orders except when the stop order price is reached, the trading will be done on limit order type. Therefore this time there is the risk that your order may be be filled if trading is active.
• Trailing Stop Orders: I will just skip this and do not recommend at this time.

5. Limit Price: Price need to be defined for Limit and Stop Limit order types.

6. Stop Price: Price need to be defined for Stop and Stop Limit order types.

7. Duration: Other than market order type, the other orders may take more time to meet the certain price requirements. Duration defines how long the order should be effective.

• Day : The order is only good for the particular trading day. If the order is submitted after hours, the order is effective only for the next trading day.
• GTC: Good till Canceled. The trading order is good until you cancel it or good for 90 days from the order submission.

8. AON : All or NONE. If checked, the all shares must be traded within one transaction and no partial execution is allowed. should not be divided the submission. Now there is a chance that your order will not be executed even if the prices met if this is enabled. But I had a question on this. If the order was filled by two or more partial transaction. Would I be charged for more than one commission fees? The answer is if that partial fills occurred within the same trading day, it will be considered one trade. But if the partial fills occurred over several days, each day will be charged as additional trades.

If you go back up and see the screen capture of the transaction order menu, you will notice that I selected Limit order type . I prefer to have control over my price and you can end up paying much higher price than you expected when buying stocks with Market order type during an active day. But if you are willing to sacrifice and take the risk , you should use Market order type especially when you need to acquire the stock fast. ( Maybe you heard a great news and need to buy the stocks before others find out.)

Now if you are satisfied, click on the ‘Review Order’ button. You will be directed to preview page. Inspect if the price and other information is correct. And click on the ‘Send Order’ to complete the order process.

Order preview page before the final submission.

The confirmation page after the final order submission.

Now that you have completed the submission. You will want to check the order status. Unless you have selected Market order, the order will not be executed unless the current prices meets your limit price. Also if AON(All or None) is enabled for the transaction, there is higher chance that your order may not be fulfilled. You can always check the order status by click on the ‘Order status’ menu on the left side menu right under ‘Trading Center’ parent menu. You can cancel it anytime by click on the ‘Cancel’ link. Once the order is executed, it will be listed under .Executions menu page.

You can check out the status under ‘Order status’ menu

That’s all about how to buy stocks with Zecco.com. Before I let you go, here is one more useful tip. Each sub menu screen of Account Overview menu (.Account Overview, .Positions, .Balances, .Order Status, .Executions, .History, .watch List ) has a ‘Set as default page’ checkbox. What it does is to let the selected page become the first page to be shown right after Zecco Trading account login. I wanted to monitor list of stock prices, so I added stock symbols under ‘Watch List’ screen and enabled the ‘Set as default page’. Therefore whenever I log into the Trading account, I get to see the ‘Watch List’ page by default.

That’s all for today. This is a short video from Zecco.com on how to buy stocks: http://zecco.s3.amazonaws.com/video/stock_order.html

Thank you for visiting How to buy stocks online.

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