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TD Ameritrade review 2010: largest and best known online discount stock broker
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- $9.99 flat trade commission for any amount of stocks
- Options commission: $9.99 plus $0.75 per contract
- No-load mutual funds: $49.99
- Investment products: stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, ETFs
With TD Ameritrade you get flat rate $9.99 commissions on every internet equity trade, regardless of account
balance or how many shares you buy.
TD Ameritrade's account registration process is well-designed and very fast. You could link to your bank account and
fund your brokerage account right away (no micro-deposits verification required). When it's done you are free to
login and explore the website. Minimum amount to open account is $2,000.
TDAmeritrade.com offers very powerful and comprehensive trading tools. And lots of them! More than enough for an average
investor. They do lack a bit in elegance and ease of use some of the best trading platforms have. And there is one major problem with
TD Ameritrade's trading system: if you have $1,000 you can't enter multiple orders on that $1,000.
Some other brokerage systems let you do this: if one order is executed, the rest are automatically cancelled.
TDAmeritrade.com is well designed and you could pretty easily find all the resources. One really neat feature is an
ability to enter trades throughout the website through the order entering box that stays on the bottom of each page.
- No trading fee surcharge for stocks under $1
- Flat commission regardless of number of shares
- Large, well known, established company with many branches
- 13 trading tools to choose from
- No monthly inactivity fees
- $9.99 trade fee for stocks is high. $49 fee for mutual funds is extremely high
- Occasional very bad execution times
- The website is sometimes very slow or even down on the most crucial days
TD Ameritrade is one of the best-known brokerage houses and is one of the largest
discount online stock brokers right now.
But it's definitely not the cheapest: $9.99 per stock trade
was very cheap in 2000, but it is considered high in 2010. $49 to buy or sell mutual fund is way
too much!
Occasionally, TDAmeritrade.com website becomes slow or goes down, or orders take forever to execute.
It often happens on most critical days when market makes a big move and this is when you really want to access
your account. In after-hours trading we often experience very long and costly order execution delays.
There are better and cheaper brokerage firms out there. You could compare TD Ameritrade to companies in
our top brokerage houses
list.
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