Can anyone tell me the best online brokerage for buying/selling investments?

I am 24 years old. I want a site with low rates and great features to use. Is there a site that is the unspoken leader in the online investment community? I have heard of Etrade, scottstrade, ameritrade but I am not sure if these are as good as they advertise.

I've been with Scottrade for about ten years now... and I believe they are the best discount brokerage available. You'll pay just $7 a trade. You'll have resources to explore. You can even get advice from one of their brokers, which will result in a small fee. Bottom line: Take it from a retired stock broker... if I could invest at a better company, I'd do it!

I would like to talk to you about what i do. Email me

I personally have used Scottrade and find it to be relatively good, with solid features and $7 trades. The cheapest reputable online brokerage is currently TradeKing which offers 4.95 trades, although most of its tools are especially geared toward options traders.

TD Ameritrade, E-Trade are both also good from what I hear, but I don't have personal experience with either.

Best of luck!

Ameritrade is pretty good (they bought Datek). They are supposed to add online bond trading in the future. This is something I have not heard of anywhere else so it'll be pretty interesting if they actually do it.

I USE "SCOTT TRADE" and have not been disappointed YET !!

I have only bought so far. We will see how selling goes in the future though.

Hmm, it depends on what you want out of it (I'm assuming you want to invest in individual corporations' issued securities and not mutual funds), but here are a few ideas:

Ameritrade/TD Waterhouse is good for people who can easily get around websites and want a modest but sufficient array of investment research tools with news/research from CBS and the S&P 500 detailed reports (if you don't know all the terminology, you will have to look it up online at a place like Yahoo! Finance). They have quick execution of trades and charge about $10 per trade (flat-fee), buy or sell (this can vary by a dollar or so depending on fees and what the competition has been up to). I believe it takes a thousand or two to open an account w/o monthly fees. Their tech support is usually on top of things and electronic money transfers are quick and painless.

Etrade has slightly better investment tools than Ameritrade but also has an often less-than-friendly tech support group. At times, they will also bug you by phone to change certain liquid investments around (admittedly, often for your own good, but sometimes, one must wonder, why they really care, and they will sometimes suggest locking it into okay-rate long-term CDs). Otherwise, their fees are usually just slightly higher than Ameritade although they somtimes are less when they feel they need to be more competitive with pricing.

Both eTrade and Ameritrade have sign-up incentives ranging from free trades for the first month to actual cash put into your brokerage account, depending on how much you put in it.

I'm afraid I don't know much about Scottstrade except that it's fairly comparable to the other two, just a bit smaller in terms of assets managed although I think their fees are also slightly less than their competitors too.

If you already have a lot of money on your hands at age 24, at least $25,000 to invest (wouldn't that be nice), go with Bank of America or Fidelity Investments. There will be drastically reduced commission fees for trade executions (usually no more than $7, and often, a limited number of trades are free) and access to some of the best research tools available on the market as well as superior tech support and easy access to live investment advisers if you think you'll need it.

While I don't know if you're looking into mutual funds, the big three are Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity. Fidelity, again, is good if you have a lot of money and Vanguard has a wide array to mutual funds with low fees and cost loads. I don't really think much of T. Rowe Price but they also have low fees and a number of investment options.

There isn't a clear "number one" in the online investment community. It depends on how much you have to invest and how much you want from your brokerage firm. Best of luck with investing.

Try Sharebuilder - www.sharebuilder.com

it's cheap

Open a Roth IRA account with Fidelity before you do anything else. Maximum investment of $4000 of the year. Invest in mutual funds. Start there and then work your way up.