Signing up for online brokers

I currently have accounts with Scottrade and Zecco. Scottrade charges $7 fee and Zecco.com is giving 10 free trades if you maintain $25,000 account balance, but even if not, it’s only $4.50 per trade. Account creation process is not easy as creating a simple free email account. It involves many steps but there are two major data submission processes.

First, your personal information. The required information is basically the same as when you sign up for a bank account. You will need to provide your name, address, phone number, date of birth, and Social Security Number too. I felt a little bit of uneasiness giving away my social security number, but this is required since they are required to report your trading history to the IRS at the end of the year. Yes, you will need to report your trading history in your tax returns. And if you have earned any money from trading, you will need to pay taxes.

Second, you will need to transfer money from your other checking or savings account to the trading account. So that you can buy stock with that money. Most of the online brokers have direct deposit service. Once you confirm the banking account is yours, you will be able to transfer money in and out of your bank account to the online broker account. In order to confirm, you can give them the password of your bank account for quick confirmation, or wait several days for them to deposit random amount of money to your bank account, and then let them know the actual amount to confirm the ownership. Since I was uncomfortable providing the online access information of my bank account, I chose the second option and waited two or three days. The confirmation process may take some time, but once it is setup properly, money transfer is quick and easy.

So the whole process may take 3 or 4 days to complete. The whole process is secure and safe , so you don’t have to worry. To tell you the truth, I was a bit worried at the first time. Once the account is ready and the money is deposited to the broker account, you are ready to buy some stocks.

I recommend Zecco.com. Zecco provides quality trading platform with the lowest fee per trade $4.50 and free trades under some conditions.

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