Latest discount brokerage
The latest discount brokerage (as reported on this FW thread) is Sogoinvest.com. They have a few pricing models, some of which include subscription fees. From what I could gather from their website, the bottomline is that for the plan without subscription nor inactivity fees, you only pay $3 per trade (market or limit), for up to 5000 shares. One of the feature is that they support automated dollar-based investing — which could be useful for those applying DCA with their ETF investments.
Overall, this is not a bad deal, and is probably better than the previous Izone-Seattle offer of $3/trade with $50 annual fee. Obviously, this assumes that all other references checks out OK.
Stumble it!
July 15th, 2006 at 7:05 am
Another interesting feature is the fractional shares. But from what I understand, it is available through the automated dollar-based investing program. This can be quite troublesome for foreign investors without a US account to do automatic fund transfer. Hope they will allow ad-hoc based fractional shares.
July 15th, 2006 at 8:51 am
The concept of fractional shares is not new, and some of the other brokerages that deal with fractional shares include Foliofn.com, Sharebuilder.com and BuyAndHold.com.
Sogoinvest’s pricing is very attractive. I might use it to accumulate my DCA into VWO instead of using Izone’s $5/trade. What is needed is a signup bonus, like the $100 bonus with TradeKing.com earlier this year …
August 7th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
[...] Recently, I wrote about the new Sogoinvest brokerage. I decided to pull the trigger and apply for the Sogoinvest account today. The application is pretty standard among brokerage accounts. You need to key in your personal information, home information, employment information, etc. It took me about 10 minutes from start to finish to apply for a joint account. This included the time taken to print to PDF a copy of every page of the online application for my own safekeeping. [...]
September 13th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
[...] Recently, I wrote about the new Sogoinvest brokerage. I decided to pull the trigger and apply for the Sogoinvest account today. The application is pretty standard among brokerage accounts. You need to key in your personal information, home information, employment information, etc. It took me about 10 minutes from start to finish to apply for a joint account. This included the time taken to print to PDF a copy of every page of the online application for my own safekeeping.On the night before my application, I shoot an email to Sogoinvest with some questions. I received a reply the next morning. Here are the questions and replies: [...]