A great place to start investing for the future!
Written: Aug 21 '01 (Updated Aug 21 '01)
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The Bottom Line
New investors and veterans alike can appreciate all that Scottrade has to offer. Cheap trades and excellent customer service put Scottrade on top.
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| Full Review |
Earlier this year, I realized that every passing day was a day that I could be helping myself establish a secure financial future, so upon the advice of a good friend, I headed on over to the Motley Fool at www.fool.com. Investment-wise, the Motley Fool is by far the best thing to have happened to me this year. One of their first pieces of advice for novice investors was to find a discount broker, a company that trades stocks (and mutual funds) for you without offering expensive advice. This led me to my second-best investment decision this year: Scottrade.
Now, the Motley Fool never took it upon themselves to recommend Scottrade (that's my job!); instead, they offered a side-by-side comparison of the services different discount brokers provide. This in itself was not extremely useful for they all seemed to be pretty much the same! In fact, the only reason I finally went with Scottrade was because of a little perk they offered that nobody else did: branch offices around the nation.
Not that at the time I really thought a local office would be extremely useful; I planned to make all my trades online to take advantage of Scottrade's super-cheap $7 commissions. But since then, I have found that being able to call an actual person when I have a question, to hear a human voice when I'm confused, is very reassuring. True, they won't give you stock ideas or investing advice, but they'll explain to you how all the processes work. The brokers are very nice too. . .and did I mention they have awesome Scottish accents? Of course, perhaps it's just coincidence that my local broker in Houston has such an accent. . .however, I find it hard to believe that he'd be the only one. . .
If, for some reason, you need help but don't find a deep, gruff Scottish accent appealing, you can always send your questions in email form. I've done this several times, and the internet help desk has been very rapid, kind, and informative. Normally, when I send an email to a company, I don't expect to get a response for several days. With Scottrade, I get a response in several hours. Now there's a company who values its customers!
There are many other things to like about Scottrade. The website is easy to navigate (albeit rather slow to load, even on my Sprint Broadband connection), and making a trade is a snap. You can check out your portfolio online, review your trade history, and access a wealth of research (ie, graphs, news articles, and more stuff than I've had time to sort through). They also have a much-touted online streamer, and though it looks neat and informative, it doesn't do much for my buy-and-hold attitude.
The number of mutual funds Scottrade offers is astounding (over 7000), and one can trade mutual funds like pokémon without having to worry about anything but capital gains taxes because, that's right, there is no fee on mutual fund trades! My current investing strategy involves buying shares of index funds at constant intervals; Scottrade facilitates this perfectly.
I could go on and list every other service that Scottrade has to offer, but one could just visit any of the various discount-broker comparison websites for that information. Scottrade usually is at top in each category anyway. But what those crazy Scotts really have going for them are their cheap rates ($7 for equities and nothing for mutual funds!) and their excellent customer support. At Scottrade, their customers are kings!
Recommended:
Yes
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About the Author
Member: Ian Hlavacek
Location: Houston, Texas, USA
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me: I'm a junior at Rice University. Go Owls!
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