Zecco Review – Free Online Stock Trading

December 17, 2008

Zecco free trades

This Zecco review looks at the free stock trades and trading platform offered by the online brokerage Zecco and how the cheap trades compare with the customer service and investment research tools.

Free Stock Trades

Zecco offers free trades (up to 10 trades per month) and zero commissions (with some strings attached, that we’ll explain) which is pretty attractive to many investors. Of course, you can’t always have your cake and eat it too. 

Zecco doesn’t have the research firepower and sleek, intuitive web site design that characterize bigger online trading sites. That said, if you can live without some traditional bells and whistles, the trading discounts can save you on commission.

Investment Data Sharing

Zecco’s social networking aspect is pretty cool; members can interact with each other via ZeccoShare, a service that combines Web 2.0 fare like forums, blogs, and profiles with key investor information like most popular stock holdings and most traded stock holdings of investors who have opted to share their investment data.

Brokerage Stability

One more point: a quick review of SEC filings reveals that Zecco should be around for a while – it has received $35 million in financing that it’s been using, in part, to improve the site’s sometimes criticized trading platform. Hey, in this economy, stability and continuity count.

Zecco Overview

Zecco stands for “Zero Cost Commission” – and that is certainly the selling point for a trading site that offers free trades and low cost option trading. Let’s face it – price-wise, you can’t do better than free stock trades. The site was founded in July, 2006, touting itself as a discount-happy online brokerage that would bake its bread on cash earned from customer on interest income and margin spreads.

If you have $25,000 in a Zecco account or make at least 25 trades a month, you earn your 10 free trades per month. After 10 trades, Zecco’s fee of $4.50 per trade kicks in.

Zecco Investment Research

What seems to be missing is the higher level of research and investment tools seen on other sites – but that is changing, and for the better. Athough Zecco touts its tutorial and blogs, we didn’t find them as helpful as we’d like. But then again, we like doing our own research – and Zecco has to keep costs down somewhere.

Zecco Customer Service

The site’s customer service wasn’t bad – we got an email response to a registration question the same day we sent it. Trade executions were fairly fast, comparable with what we saw in our earlier TradeKing review.

In the next portion of the Zecco review we’ll take a look at the trading fees, options trades, and margin accounts offered by Zecco.

Brian

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Brian

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Comments

6 Responses to Zecco Review – Free Online Stock Trading

  • John sloan

    I took a good advice and signed up with scottrade.com and got 3 free
    trades with this promo code: YWEU0574

  • invester rules

    This is a very good option for the share holders, they can learn every thing about the stock market over here. The brokers of the stock market can help you to lead the world of stock market.

  • Online Stock Trading

    Thank you for the great post. Sharing your ideas and info about online stock trading benefit and help us. Cheers.

  • andy

    Zecoo is a great brokerage service which I have used for a while and recommend to new investors. No bells and whistles, but you get cheap trades.

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