CHEAPEST ONLINE STOCK BROKER 2011
It’s 2011 and there are a lot of well established online stock brokers to choose from. I use E*Trade because they were one of the first to be online and they were one of the top dogs when I opened my account. I am very happy with them and have never thought about moving my money to another broker even though I could get cheaper trades elsewhere. So which one is the cheapest?
Right now that “honor” goes to OptionsHouse which charges only $3.95 per stock trade. You can see that they are a dollar cheaper than TradeKing and $6 cheaper than I am paying with E*Trade.
If you are researching online brokers because you want to buy stocks for the first time, you might be looking for the cheapest online company so you can save money. While there is not a huge difference between $3.95 and $9.99, it does add up if you start to make more trades. Remember, every stock you buy has to be sold sometime so there are 2 trades involved with each stock you own so it make sense to pay the least amount per trade.
Lets’s say you average buying 10 stocks every year. That will mean a total of 20 trades (a buy and a sell for each) and if you go with OptionsHouse your cost of making those trades will be 20 X $3.95 = $79. If you go with a higher priced broker like E*Trade your cost will be 20 X $9.99 = $199.80. That is a difference of about $120 and that might be enough to persuade you to choose the cheaper option. After all, why pay more than you have to if everything else is the same?
One might wonder about the safety of your money. Is the money you send in to OptionsHouse just as safe as all the other online brokers on that chart? Do cheaper trades mean your money is less safe? In a word, NO! In today’s world of stock investing online, all the brokers you see on the chart above are reputable and your money should be safe in any of them.
You can access the OptionsHouse website to view your portfolio and make trades anytime from either a PC or a Mac.
