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.
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.
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 … 😉
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