[Infowarrior] - More on.....RFI Online Brokerages

[Richard Forno]

Some initial responses.........rf

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My personal IRA accounts are mostly at low-fee brokers like Schwab,
Waterhouse, and Scott Trade.  Lots of choices, many no-load funds, low fees.

My investment club uses AmeriTrade, again for low transaction fee and many
choices. We trade mostly single stocks in the investment club.

I advise against using any single-family fund brokerages (Fidelity,
Vanguard, etc.) because no one fund family has all the best funds, and fund
family salesmen have a built-in conflict of interest against giving unbiased
advice to the customer.  Also, we do not use a sales-based advisor whose
fees depend on transaction fees, but rather a fee-based advisor who provides
objective advice independent of sales incentives.  Usually fee-based
advisors charge a small percentage of the portfolio's value, so their
interest coincides with the owner's in increasing the value of the
portfolio.

Use the public library's resources (Value Line, Morningstar, etc.) to obtain
low-cost, high-quality advice.  Use the many on-line resources (Quicken, for
example) to learn more about investing and track the market and performance
of stocks, bonds, and funds.

Consider joining an investment club to learn more and combine your money
with friends to create your own mutal fund.  I've been a member for more
than ten years and now haveover $10,000 as my share, built from $25 monthly
contributions.

Hope this is useful.

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TD Ameritrade works for me! I switched from XP to OS X recently, and
have no complaints (well, I use Firefox on both platforms, so maybe
that made the switch easier). Anyway, I'd be interested to see what
the aggregated list shows.

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I've found Optionsexpress to be handy and helpful.  No frills and decent
service.  Mostly for options trading, but they do stocks as well.

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ameritrade and scott trade have gotten rather good reviews. I use
eTrade myself because they are a NoVA company and I wasn't overly
concerned with trading fees.