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Smart Money magazine 2009 discount online stock broker ratings.
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SmartMoney Magazine published their annual online stock broker ratings for 2009. There you could find out
how according to authors of the ratings your broker compares to other brokerage houses.
Brokerage companies are rated in the following categories:
Investment Products, Banking Services, Trading Tools, Research and Customer Service.
The winner in 2009 is Etrade
- it got top grade on most categories.
Unfortunately, SmartMoney doesn't rate stock brokers on their commissions and fees, which doesn't make much sense.
Etrade has high commissions and charges a lot of fees, yet that is not a factor in ratings.
In the second and third places are Fidelity and Charles Shcwab, which both charge their
customers even more in commissions and fees than Etrade.
Tradeking is at the fourth
place, but it should be at least second.
TD Ameritrade is in fifth position,
which is odd considering poor trade execution times and poor performance of their website on critical days.
Muriel Siebert with
second highest commissions - $14.95 per trade - is higher than
Scottrade with $7 per trade.
Another strange thing about this survey is that many great brokers, like
Interactive Brokers,
MB Trading,
tradeMONSTER and
Optionshouse,
were not rated at all.
Of course, anyone is entitled to their opinion and hopefully the results of SmartMoney Magazine broker ratings
would be valuable to you.
You could also check out Best Brokerage Firms Ratings.
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The Best and Worst Discount Brokers By Investment Category
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Best |
Worst |
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Commissions & Fees
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Just2Trade beats out Zecco this year.
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WellsTrade
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Investment Products & Mutual Funds
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Fidelity carries more than 16,000 mutual funds, mostly no-load.
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SogoTrade has no mutual funds at all! Well, they cater to active traders.
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Customer Service
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Muriel Siebert edges out TradeKing this year.
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WallStreet*E
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Trading Tools
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TD Ameritrade
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ShareBuilder
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Banking Services
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ETrade, Fidelity, WellsTrade
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SogoTrade and Scottrade
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Investment Research
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ETrade and Charles Schwab
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Zecco and WallStreet*E, but improvements are in the works.
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Some companies mentioned in this article are currently running promotions for new customers.
You could find the list of
brokerage promotions here.
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