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I find their baby commercials really stupid but somehow always end up laughing at them.
I find their baby commercials really stupid but somehow always end up laughing at them.
E*Trade screwed me over with inactivity fees. I didn't realize that they'd penalize me for not being a day trader. Scottrade is a little more bare bones but has been much better to me.
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@diesel54: exactamundo. two biggest reasons to dump e*trade
1) ridiculous inactivity fees ($40 a quarter! for what? actually buying and holding, and not being already rich doing so?)
2) ridiculous time and effort (and possibly more fees) to get your money out and account closed. Took me almost 3 months and several dozen phone calls to eTrade to successfully get certificates issued for remaining securities and the balance of my cash account moved out of that hellhole.
Best part was when an 'advisor' I talked to offered to simply make my securities 'vanish' (meaning dump them into his own account), free of charge. What a pal.
My recommendation is to go nowhere near eTrade, ever.
@savvy9999: Not to defend inactivity fees, but let's clarify a bit here.
You don't have to be a \"day trader.\" You can avoid the inactivity fee by making ONE trade per quarter. That's really not so bad.
Granted, many of their competitors have no inactivity fee at all, so yeah...
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@diesel54: Maintain a combined balance of over (don't quote me) $50,000 to avoid inactivity and account fees. I don't day trade either. I currently only have $9 in my brokerage account with them, but more than $50k across my checking account and IRAs, so no fees on any of the accounts. I love having all of these accounts in one place, all linked to one dashboard. When I want to buy something in the non-retirement brokerage account, I can instantly move money. When I sell, I move it back, aggregating cash into the highest %-rate earning account.
This is E*Trade after all though. My emergency fund is with another firm.
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@tinyhands: Wow, you're fortunate to HAVE $50,000. You expect the rest of us to just produce that amount of money somewhere?
According to my broker at Scottrade, this is picking up in the industry, he said they are going to be doing this soon too.
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E*Trade also screwed over my gf with the supposed 100 free trades and their fees are way too high compared to Scottrade's (when it's not free anymore).
\"Personally I don't like E*Trade because it feels like the site is designed to look like a video game but to each his own.\"
This is officially the stupidest reason for not using a web site...ever.
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@Javert: Making it look like a video game encourages people to treat investing like a video game, which it's not. I prefer a site like Vanguard that me want to go take a nap after I make my transaction, not play around with all the buttons and make more transaction than I might otherwise.
@Ben Popken: But they make their money primarily from transaction fees because they don't do any underwriting per se. Why would you expect a dry economist approach when the entire purpose of getting you online is to generate income for themselves?
@H3ion: I don't begrudge them the right to design their system as they have. I myself personally just would rather go to Vanguard or Scottrade.
It's all fine and dandy except, you are better off investing in proper money market funds that invest in cd's, bonds, and t-bills. You still get the interest from those investments AND you get near instant access to your money without penalties.
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t-bills and money market funds rates are to low when you figure in some inflation, dollar value decline and taxes owed on the interest, you basically are losing money.
True, but the purpose of those vehicles was never to make money, it was a place to put money that earned more than the bank and might keep up with inflation.
Normally, I would say having fixed income in your portfolio is okay. But not now. Except for riskier junk bonds, rates are super low. The Fed is printing paper money like madmen, flooding with world with dollars. When rates rise, bonds get kicked in the butt big time. Rates can't go much lower. Higher rates are in the future. At some point, investors are going to want higher rates to buy Govt. bonds. With our national debt out of control, credit risk becomes an issue. Finally, inflation is bad for bonds, too. ...
This is actually a pretty cool idea, methinks.
Now if only I had a job so I could invest some monies in my nest egg...