Online Brokerage Recommendation

[Dante_311]

I have been interested in starting an online trading account and was wondering what recommendations everyone had for e-brokers (e-trade, scottrade, ect.). I do not plan on trading very much and most likely will go for buying some sort of index.
_____________________
The Quintessential Finance Blog

[Mary Webber]

I've been very satisfied with E*Trade, although sometimes the lower trade fees on other sites are appealing, at least until I've checked the details.

[jmarti22]

I use tradeking.com for online brokerage. Other good sites are scottrade and zecco.com which is offering free trades for the month of October. Keep in mind though that now is not a good time to buy stock since everything is losing.

[luckytaxi]

Originally Posted by jmarti22

I use tradeking.com for online brokerage. Other good sites are scottrade and zecco.com which is offering free trades for the month of October. Keep in mind though that now is not a good time to buy stock since everything is losing.

If you're holding long term, NOW is the time to buy. Well, I would wait a couple of more weeks when things start to bottom out (could it?). You get more shares for your money. I picked out a few hundred shares of GM earlier today. if you're in it for the short term, then buying stocks is a bad idea. I'm holding 5+ yrs so I can wait it out.

I use ameritrade.

[Xin Lu]

I use tradeking. They have great service with a flat 4.95 commission. Zecco has like 0 service and I couldn't get my money in at all because I got locked out of my account and I couldn't get someone to change my password. This was a couple years ago.

[luckytaxi]

Originally Posted by Xin Lu

I use tradeking. They have great service with a flat 4.95 commission. Zecco has like 0 service and I couldn't get my money in at all because I got locked out of my account and I couldn't get someone to change my password. This was a couple years ago.

I dont mind paying the extra money for great service. I dont trust the new companies out there (zecco, tradeking, etc...), as i want to know that they will be around for yrs to come.

[lucille]

Originally Posted by luckytaxi

If you're holding long term, NOW is the time to buy. Well, I would wait a couple of more weeks when things start to bottom out (could it?). You get more shares for your money. I picked out a few hundred shares of GM earlier today. if you're in it for the short term, then buying stocks is a bad idea. I'm holding 5+ yrs so I can wait it out.

I use ameritrade.

This is why I am not too upset about our 401k right now. We only started that specific account less than a year ago and only a portion of it is directly in the stock market. So we lost a little but what is automatically being bought into it now is getting more bang for the buck. So if or when it does recover it should exponentially improve.
Our previous 401k was cashed out rather than rolled over so we cashed it out near the peak to use for an emergency. So I think we lucked out on both.