User Overview
Joined: 2009-10-19 12:41:57
Points: 50
Online Stock Broker Reviews: 2
Average Holding Period: months
Average Trade Frequency: 50 - 99
Portfolio Size: $1,000 - $49,999
Sentiment: bullish
Points: 50
Online Stock Broker Reviews: 2
Average Holding Period: months
Average Trade Frequency: 50 - 99
Portfolio Size: $1,000 - $49,999
Sentiment: bullish
Online Stock Broker Reviews By 17g33k
by 17g33k ( 50 ) on 2009-12-05 15:37:27I joined thinkorswim about 7 months ago and it was one of the best online brokerages available. Thinkorswim offers two types of commission rates, per share or flat fee, and you can change this with each trade. The per share rate is $0.015 per share with a $5 minimum. The flat fee is $9.95 for up to 5,000 shares. I personally don't have tons of money to invest so the per share has allowed me to keep my trading fees down to $5. This is not the lowest available but leaves you making no compromises with quality of service as other brokerages do.
Thinkorswim allows you to trade not only stocks, but mutual funds, options, futures, and forex. Several other brokers only offer one or two of these types of investments. This is definitely a plus in my book.
Thinkorswim also offers a FREE application that is very customizable and displays everything in real-time. You can have your charts update every hour or every second depending on how you like to read them. The application also expands very nicely allowing you to open tons of chars and do various studies and comparisons. This is especially useful when using multiple computer screens. There are several companies that offer similar software that has the same functionality, but cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Thinkorswim does require a $4,000 minimum to open an account, but once it is open and you begin trading, it doesn't hold you to that minimum and does not charge you any fees because of it. They also do not charge any monthly fees or inactivity fees which is important to me because my trading goes in phases of how active I am.
Overall, thinkorswim allows you to customize investing to your particular needs and gives you the tools you need to make good investment decisions.
The best part of joining thinkorswim is that they send you a free monkey wearing a thinkorswim t-shirt. :-P
by 17g33k ( 50 ) on 2009-12-05 16:03:20Sharebuilder has several strong points and several weak points. This was the first online brokerage I joined. Its appeal was its simplicity, no minimum account value to start, and documentation that is well written to help a first time investor or just inactive investors to get started. Also the fact that it was part of ING Direct gave a sense of security as you may have never heard of many of the other available online brokerages. The interface is extremely simple and hard to get confused. Their trading fees are a bit high at $9.95 per trade unless you setup automatic weekly or monthly investments in which case your trading fees drop to around $5. There several levels of membership, but they do offer a basic membership which has no monthly fee. There are no inactivity fees which is important to me because my trading goes in phases of activity.
The aspects of sharebuilder that I did not like are plenty. This brokerage caters to an investor interested in time-cost averaging rather than day trading and therefore does not freely give you real-time info, which makes trading more difficult in my opinion. There were a couple occasions where I calculated the cost of X amount of shares of a security and by the time the money made it into my account, the price had changed drastically and left me owing money. Also, the gains/losses page in the portfolio section of their website takes overnight to refresh your profit and loss which is frustrating when you want to check your numbers after a big day in the market.
As chris86 stated, their website went down for over an hour during a heavy trading day earlier this year and preventing me from doing any trading on that day which was extremely frustrating and unprofessional. I know they have upgraded their infrastructure since then to handle such peak times in trading, but this definitely affected my opinion of them.
Ultimately I chose to leave sharebuilder for thinkorswim because sharebuilder only offered access to stocks and mutual funds. I am quite new to investing, but I wanted to start looking into options and possibly futures and forex trading, but these are all things that sharebuilder does not offer.
I still manage two separate portfolios for other people using sharebuilder, but no longer trade there myself.
Sharebuilder is a great site for new investors to get started with since there is no minimum for account value and its basic features will satisfy most investors while they are getting started. It is also great for people saving strictly for retirement as it offers automatic investing and a method that is optimal for time-cost averaging. It does not have monthly or inactivity fees which is good for the casual or inactive investor. If you want to be an active investor or get into more complex trading I would recommend finding a more robust brokerage.
