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Strategies & Market Trends : Roth IRA ideas -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sequoia Holdings who wrote (155)	5/11/1998 4:47:00 PM
From: Bill J. Landis	Respond to of 388

on May 11 1998 3:03PM EST Sequoia Holdings wrote: Thread, best online trading company to set up a Roth IRA? ETrade has no initiation or annual fees, but it is ETrade:) Datek charges initiation fees and annua fees. Anyone have input on some other good companies? Thanks. Being only a few months into investing, and having not even set up my own IRA yet (to come very soon ...), I'm no expert, but here's a smidge anyway. Waterhouse Securities - waterhouse.com - also has no initiation or annual fees for an IRA and from what I've read a decent reputation. I think their normal account minimum of $2,000 is less for an IRA (not sure if it is $1,000 or even less ... it's on the website). Commissions are $12 for up to 5000 shares online, slightly more for Touch Tone or Phone transactions. They also have a family of No Transaction Fee (NTF) if you're into that. Options premiums are reasonable by not great (in my limited experience). They also have other great perks such as free checkwriting and ATM, and I believe a normal Visa card (through their "Bank" arm) that pays 1% cash back (for cash/margin accounts obviously). A final big plus is that they have local branch offices all over the country. On the downside, their online trading is slow and kludgy enough that some people have actually started moving to other brokerages. I've only been using it for a few days, and it's been tolerable, but only barely so. If you buy and hold making only a few transactions a month (or less) then all signs I've seen are good for Waterhouse. For day trading definitely look elsewhere. As always they say they are upgrading their servers, etc, but who knows if they can keep up with the growth of users. They've also got a thread here on SI with some great contributors. Subject 15420 Hope that helps some!! --Bill Landis