Buying Stocks
 

Can someone point me in the general direction of stock buying? I hear e-Trade is good but I'm not sure. I always hear they are full of many stipulations when you buy or trade. Help.
Thanks.
me

most online brokerages will have fees apply as to how high your balance must be and what not...most also have minimum opening deposits(for example, Ameritrade is $2000 for brokerage accounts and $1000 for IRA accounts)...others may be different. They all charge you on a per trade basis, but some give you a certain number of trades free per month depending on your account balance. Watch out for companies that let you put in a minimum deposit of say $1000 but charge you $25 per quarter when your balance is not like $5000...this happened to a friend of mine that was on e-trade(it was an ira account). Supposedly Scottrade is a good company to use if you are not looking to get in right away for thousands of dollars...I am a user of Ameritrade for my IRA account and am very happy...hope this helped

When beginning trading, I would highly recommend commiting at the very least a thousand dollars. Unless you are going to invest <1000 in penny stocks, you'll have difficulty cancelling out commission on your trades. So just hoard your money until you have enough and put it in a brokerage account. Like pcockren, I am a very happy Ameritrade user.

Yeah, brokerage fees are high enough that it doesn't make sense to invest less than a grand. I like my vanguard account for my IRA, and unfortunately can't use any of the smaller brokers because of my work (like e-trade).

I am a penny trader using Scottrade. They do not have any stipulations that are out of the ordinary that I know of.....cheap trades, and reliable is what you want.