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ShareBuilder review 2010: very low cost automatic investment brokerage firm
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- Automatic Investments: Basic plan - $4 per investment
- Standard plan - $12/month, you get 6 automatic investments and each additional is $2
- Advantage plan - $20/month, you get 20 automatic investments and each additional is $1
- Options commission: Early Exercise - $30 per early exercise, no trade commission; Automatic Exercise -
$20 per automatic exercise, no trade commission
- Mutual funds: 70 free funds including the ING Mutual Funds. 170 no-load funds from leading no-load mutual fund families
- Investment products: stocks, options, mutual funds, ETFs
ShareBuilder is the only big online stock broker offering automatic investment plans. These plans might be beneficial to
those investors who choose to accumulate core positions over time (cost-average).
ShareBuilder new account opening process is one of the easiest I experienced. There is no minimum initial deposit
requirement, so you could quickly open account and check out if you like what ShareBuilder has to offer before
committing your money.
You could conveniently fund account electronically from your checking account or you could open
high interest savings account from the Sharebuilder's parent company
ING Direct.
ShareBuilder's trading tools are easy to use but rudimentary. They get job done but the firm should
invest more into developing more sophisticated trading platform.
- Very low Automatic Investing Plans costs
- Free dividend and capital gains reinvestment
- No account minimum
- No-fee IRA and ESA accounts
- No inactivity or maintenance fees
- Ability to buy fractions of a stock
- $0 to open cash account. $2,000 for margin account
- Real-time trades at $9.95 are somewhat expensive
- You don't know at what price you are buying investments with Automatic Investing Plans
- Weak trading tools
- Few mutual funds choices
ShareBuilder, which was bought by banking giant ING, is known for its automatic investing plans,
which allow investors to take advantage of dollar-cost-averaging by arranging to have a set amount invested daily,
weekly, biweekly or monthly. It also offers a rare feature of buying fractional shares, which could be beneficial
to those investors looking to invest in very high-priced stocks, like Berkshire Hathaway.
ShareBuilder has no minimum balance requirements, no inactivity or maintenance fees, unless you subscribe to one
of the monthly plans with a fee. You could open account with $0 and see if you like it.
If you are looking to invest money automatically or dollar-cost-average your investments then ShareBuilder is the
broker for you. For everything else there are better brokerage firms so be sure to check out
broker reviews.
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