Free Stock Trading Taking Off

At the beginning of this week Zecco announced they would offer limited free trading accounts on their web site (40trades/mo, min $2500). There has been alot press and interest in it, but I have been skeptical - after all, when I purchase a stock investment I hope to hold it for 30yrs and I want to make sure the institution thats holding the stock is going to be around as well. Given Zecco has been in existence for only a few months, I have been taking a wait and see approach.


However, today Bank of America announced it to would begin offering free trading in its brokerage accounts (30trades/mo, min$25,000). Why is this significant? Bank of America is a very large, well established financial institution. When a company like Bank Of America starts offering free trading in its brokerage account its probably time for all established brokerage firms to look at offering lower (or even no) transaction costs. I think this can only be good news for stock investors.

Related in Stocks:

Chairmen Letters to Shareholders (Mar 09, 2014) Its that time of year again --the close of fiscal years means an overload of annual reports including Letters to Shareholders. Two annual letters that I read each year are those from Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet) and Fairfax Financial (Prem...

Investment Performance January 2014 (-2.94%) (Feb 23, 2014) January 2014 Investment Report: January Highlights: January was a bad way to start out the year, but our portfolio performed slightly better thank our benchmark (-2.94% vs -3.17%). We made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs, and some...

Investment Performance December 2013 (+2.20%) (Jan 10, 2014) December 2013 Investment Report: December Highlights: December was another subpar for us as our portfolio performed poorly compared to our benchmark (+2.20% vs +2.58%). We made our regular monthly investments in our Roth IRAs, and some dividends & dividend reinvestments....

Comments (2)


Somehow, I'm sure the larger banks/brokerage houses will find some way to make up the lost revenue from fees in some other way the customer won't realize at first.

Flexo, I wouldn't be suprised if your right - my only hope would be that the overall holding cost ends up being reduced (e.g. the hidden fees end up being less that the current higher transaction fees).

Post a comment

(Comment moderation enabled.)

About 2millionblog.com

A personal finance weblog of my journey to reach my goal of $2 million + the value of my primary residence.
Current Net Worth: $1,938,393

Sponsors

New Personal Finance Articles




PF Blogs