You have some of your hard earned money to invest, but now you need to look at some online stock brokers to find the best one for you. I've reviewed the most popular brokers and shared my thoughts. There is no question there are a number of greedy online stock brokers out there, who only care about extracting as much money from you as they can in the way of fees. My goal here is to help you avoid these sharks!
Picking the right stock broker can have a massive effect on your trading results. In some cases, picking a broker with higher fees can be the different between having a positive return and a negative return.
One of the most popular brokers around. They are very well known in the community for offering free stock trades.
ChoiceTrade is a broker that was established in 1999 and offers stock trades for a flat $5. You can even trade penny stocks for this low cost.
ETrade are a large international broker that have been around for many years. They offer stock trading starting at $7.99 a trade. They also don't charge extra for trading penny stocks. They also offer trading in other instruments including forex and futures.
Questrade is a Canadian owned and operated broker. They offer highly competitive trading for those looking to buy Canadian stocks.
If you have any personal experiences with any of these online stock brokers, please feel free to send them to me and i'll put them on this site.
For some traders, using more than one brokerage can be beneficial. For example some stock brokers charge extra fees for trading penny stocks whilst others do not. This is talked about in the reviews.
Another factor that is important to traders who trade on margin is the margin rates. These rates can vary massively between different online brokers.
For my penny stock trading, I use Zecco, they are my first choice as they have no additional fees for buying low priced stocks. However, for my margin trading, I use OptionsHouse as they have the lowest margin rates of any broker I have come across and also offer very low cost trading.
I am sure you get the idea. Your trading strategy often needs to dictate the brokerage you choose.
As a final note, OptionsXpress is the only broker I have reviewed to date that offers international traders the opportunity to trade US Equities.