Scottrade Review - Best Online Stock Brokerage

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A good online broker is not only one that has competitive fee structure, but also one that is tailor made to suit your needs. So, before you jump onto the bandwagon and open an account with an online broker, one must understand the features. In this article, we shall review the Scottrade, one of the renowned US based online brokerage firm.

Scotttrade has earned its name to be the best discount broker, with whom one can trade the stocks at a very reasonable and competitive rate. One can also deal with options, futures, ETFs, Mutual funds and bonds. The firm was established in 1980, and today it has grown into a strong 500 branch establishment all round the US. It has earned its position in Forbes List of best US employers in US. They are a company that has maintained its positions high in customer satisfaction surveys.

For a new comer, let us discuss some of the features of Scottrade.

The account is damn easy to open : One can easily open individual as well as a joint account. In case of a joint account, as many as 3 people can be members of the account. The account allows you to trade in almost all kinds of instruments like stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, options, futures etc. For trading in stocks, the fees are $7 per trade (for stock prices $1 and above), and for options trade the fees is $7 plus $1.25 per trade.

Business and Trust Accounts: Beside individual accounts, one can also open a business (for corporate and LLC) and trust accounts with Scottrade. The trust account variations are regular, PSP, MPP or Keogh.

Individual Retirement Accounts: Scottrade offers different types of retirement accounts for individuals as well as the employers. The type of accounts that are available is Simple IRAs, Traditional, SEP, Roth and Rollover.

Initial Deposit to open an Account : To open a brokerage account with Scottrade one has to make and maintain a minimum deposit of $500. To be able to trade in options, the minimum balance limit gets enhanced to S2000. These levels are very much reasonable compared to other brokerage firms.

Wide Variety of trading options : With Scottrade one can trade in almost all kinds of investment options like that of stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds etc. It gives you the flexibility to invest in instruments of almost 20 countries besides the US. The platform gives the option to invest in almost 15000 mutual fund variants, out of which 3000 funds do not charge any fees. All these variations give and excellent opportunity to diversify.

No maintenance fees: For all investors there are times when there is no trading activity. During such times, Scottrade does not charge any fees. This great money saving option compared to many other brokerage firms which charge some minimum account maintenance fees if there are no trades.

Besides the above benefits, Scottrade is available 24x7 through email, chat or on the phone. They conduct extensive customer education programs, online and offline. The customers also get one to one support through the 500 branches all over US. In short, by choosing Scottrade an investor will make his like easy and profitable. So, go for it, the site is highly recommended.