What is the most affordable online brokerage for the extremely small investor?

if you are looking for online brokerage:
scottrade, ameritrade, sharebuilder, schwab, fidelity are pretty good. Check their websites and find out which works best for you.

If you are looking for mutual funds investment check out vanguard or trowe price. I am vanguard fanatic and will recommend them.

scottrade
ameritrade

sharebuilder.com

Wescom Credit Union
They do everything from Banking, Investing and insurance.

Vanguard may be the cheapest.

For small investments, consider Certificates of Deposit. They are close in interest paid with T bills and T bonds.
Look at banks in your area first. Most banks will be close in interest offered.

wescom as the other young lady answered, also e- trade.

Scottrade hands down.

Personally, I have been using sharebuilder.com for quite some time and love it. I am still a rather "small investor" at this time, but give you and me a few years and we'll be up with the big boys... ;o)


Sharebuilder makes it easy to invest with low fees and automatic investing. Recently, they upgraded their website to make it easy to track and transfer funds into the account. It's the perfect account for kids and adults alike. You can rather easily send money into the account or transfer funds from your bank website via a 'Bill Pay' feature. You can also send in a check...

They offer thousands of Exchange Traded Funds, mutual funds and stocks. Even their money market account, the area your cash sits in the account before you buy something, has an interest rate above 4.5% right now.

I would note however, that you shouldn't buy shares with anything lower than $200 with their "Tuesday" program [more on that in a second]. It's a minor pitfall for a first time investor, but say you get into investing $50 a week, they charge $4 or an 8% fee to buy. Rather than do a weekly purchase of $50, do a monthly purchase of $200, which is only a 2% fee.

If you stayed in the $50/week mode, you would be paying a large chunk of your cash in fees. A monthly option, depending on how much you plan to invest, might be the best way to go.

Sharebuilder allows you to invest every Tuesday for only $4. Its not a perfect way to time the market, but if you NEEDED to buy something on a Friday or whatnot, they charge a pretty large fee of $15.95 to buy. Take advantage of the Tuesday buying and make it automatic.

Depending on your age and if you make any money on the books, I would highly recommend opening a Roth IRA and fund that first before doing a regular account. Because its so easy and cheap, open both at the same time and fund both accounts!

I would start with Sharebuilder, ScotTrade and E*TRADE..

I'd go for Interactive Brokers.

Let's make money!

Good luck

Marc

scottrade