Not gonna do much investing other than rolling over some IRAs. But want to get set up if I do. Getting rid of Edward Jones and looking for something else. Thanks in advance!
whoever has no annual fee..... check out the usual discount firms, etrade, schwab, scottrade, TD ameritrade etc etc if you are only going to invest in mutual funds you could also deal direct with the fund companies.. again, research annual IRA/Custody fees
Depends on what you want. Self serve is Fidelity, TD Waterhouse, Schwab. Full service is an advisor at one of the wire houses, ie Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch or JP Morgan.
Thanks, Socal, it'll be one of Fidelity, TD Waterhosue, or Schwab. Which is the best of those three for a moderate investor?
I switched to Scottrade which has been awesome. They have local offices if you have questions but don't give stock advice and don't try to sell you things. Had brokers before which sold my stocks and ira to other brokers who were owned by bank of America.. You all know how I feel about BoA. The reality is you don't need stock broker middlemen to take commissions for something you can research online in 5 minutes and buy for a 7 dollar trade.
it doesn't take that long to read quarterly reports, get charts from a day,week or a year, read about the management and what the company's about and where YOU think the company is going.. Stocks are always a risk. I do more than 5 minutes research before I buy a stock but I don't need to pay a guy sitting behind a desk to do something I can do myself. I'm a small fish so no big deal, if you are investing serious money get an advisor
does your bank have a brokerage division? Might be able to get a very low cost account. For our self-directed accounts we use our Banks (Zions Bank) brokerage division. I think most banks have them.
TD Waterhouse has some pretty strong research tools, so does ScottTrade. Full service can be some one other than at an Investment Bank. Ameriprise is who we use for our full-service account.
I have no issues with Fidelity. I hate to admit that I don't keep track of the fees, but in like how their website works if I want to change money around and if I have a problem the people I deal with are very helpful.
My wife is with Merril Lynch. She does nothing to manage it. Every time I see one of her statements I see tiny little trades that she gets charged $29 for. I mean trades like 9 shares for $150. That makes no sense to me. But it's her money and I need to keep my comments to myself. I use Chuck. Advice when you need it, and no funny fees.
Scottrade is the only one that will not call you and try to sell you stuff..... If the account is over $50k the others will call you regularly to try and steer you into one of their fee based products. TD and Etrade you can open an account and never fund it but still have access to all the research tools....
I've been VERY pleased with e-trade for five or six years now. No annual and low trading fees. No hassles or sales pressure.
I use a local bank. A buddy of mine manages investment accounts for them. The fees are nominal, and I have a phone number to call and talk to locally when I have questions.
Just get a Scottrade/etrade/whatever account. If you don't really know the difference between a P/E ratio and a debt/equity ratio, then simply load your US equities allocation into a SPDR, ticker SPY tracks the S&P500 to a T, and pays currently 1.82% yield. There's a really famous guy named Bill Miller... famous in financial circles, anyway. You know why he's famous? Because he beat that S&P500 index with his Vanguard fund 10 years straight. That's it. No other major mutual fund manager had done that at the time. Granted it's tricky when you start considering asset bloat, etc, but dammit that's the reason these guys make beaucoup bucks: to outperform the market. Most don't. Unless you want to teach yourself investing, which is certainly doable, and you can even learn to outperform the market with smaller dollar amounts than the mutual fund guys manage, just stick with Spiders. Simple.
