Awesome blog entry about personal finances and free eBooks. Enjoy!

Mint - Personal Finance Blog

Taken from Mint.com:

What is Mint?

Elevator Pitch

Mint is building a free, simple, and secure personal finance web-app. Designed to be effortless, Mint consolidates your financial life in one place. Easily see how much you have, how much you owe, and where your money goes. Advanced alerts notify you before you bounce a check or forget to pay a bill. Patent pending algorithms even show you personalized ways to save and make more money. If your finances could use organization without effort, Mint is for you.

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Mint is backed by leading early stage funding firm First Round Capital, and strategic angel investors, including top former or current executives from eBay, Intuit, Google, Yahoo, Charles Schwab, Wilson Sonsini, Reuters, Adteractive and Weblogic/BEA. Mint’s executive team is comprised of experts in security, privacy, consumer Internet, business development, and advanced algorithms from companies like PayPal and PGP.

So I guess it’s time to start posting my thoughts on the market and my portfolio. My initial starting deposit was $800. This is not enough to be competitive in the stock market. Some suggest a minimum of $2500. It hurts having so little since it’s difficult to be fully diversified. However, learning before investing real capital can’t hurt too much. Everyone loses money at one point or another. I’d prefer to do that at the beginning!

Start of June: $800

My first trade consisted of a single share of Jamba Juice, Inc. (JMBA). I bought it a little under $10 and sold for $11. Hey, I made a dollar in about 24 hours. Not entirely shabby, although a bit laughable. However, it did get me over the mental hurdle of the first trade. I’ll start describing my current portfolio next post. I’ll also start providing useful personal finance links that I can catch around the internet and other blogs. Have a good weekend!

Now that I’ve gotten the two discount broker reviews I’ve test driven, it’s time to start commenting on my portfolio and the grand scheme of things. I’ve been interested in the stock market for quite some time now (essentially when I entered college in 2000). I’ve always been great with numbers, and subsequently, studied to be an engineer. Recently, I watched an episode of Mad Money on CNBC with Jim Cramer. He’s not the typical investor I guess you could say. He reminds me of Pee Wee’s Playhouse… all the noises and lights and just outright oddness. But he’s good. I decided to pick up all three of his books, starting with his autobiography, Confessions of a Street Addict, and his two investing books, Sane Investing in an Insane World, and Mad Money, Watch TV, Get Rich. I haven’t had a chance to start his autobiography yet. His other two investing books have great fundamentals and are written in layman terminology, a plus for us novice investors.

I recently sold my laptop (4 years old) for $500. I figured I’d use that money for the purchase of a new laptop but realized I really didn’t need one. I decided to take a chance and invest the $500 (after paying off credit cards and the usual debt). Over the next few months, I hope to showcase my gains and losses with such a small amount of money in order to prove the power of the stock market and how anyone, putting some work into it, can be pretty good as some of the experienced folks. As of this morning I was up $6. Not a bad start if you ask me.

Here’s a review on my primary discount brokerage firm, Zecco.

Fees/Commissions: Zecco offers $0 commissions up to 10 trades per day or 40 trades per month. Commission fees are $3.50 after the free trade requirement is met. Options trading is $3.50 + $0.60 per contract. They offer no-load mutual funds for $10 a transaction.

Investments Offered: Zecco offers basic investments including stocks, options, mutual funds and ETFs.

Platform Features: Zecco’s platform provides real-time quotes, graphs, and options chains. The more informal platform, myZecco, has forums and blogs for other investors/traders to swap ideas and questions. Zecco also has a small table below your main trade window with lines for various quotes that can be updated on the fly without having to leave the current screen.

Security: Zecco has two layers of security. First, you must access your myZecco page. From there, you can log in to any of your trading accounts using a different password. Zecco is also an SIPC member.

Ease of Use: Their trading platform was not as easy to use as TradeKing’s, but it’s sufficient for the first time investor. In order to join their money market sweep program, you must contact their customer service directly.

Support: Zecco’s main form of communication is via e-mail. They normally respond rather quickly during business hours. I did recieve an e-mail from Zecco once during the weekend so it does appear that they have a skeletal crew working the weekend shifts.

Pros

• Two layers of security
• ACH link was extremely quick (about 2 business days)
• Allow for beginning options trading with little to no investing experience
• FREE Commissions (as long as you don’t pass their limits)
• Money market sweeps average about 4%
• Daily snail mail transaction reports

Cons

• Money market sweeps requires minimum of $500 in your cash account to be eligible
• ACH deposits can take a couple of business days to clear
• Sales of equities can take a couple of business days to clear into your account
• Not the most appealing platform
• No after hours trading

Summary: Zecco appears to be gaining steam in the discount brokerage game. It’s very difficult to top a $0 commission fee on regular equities. Their options fees are also very low. Their ACH process was much quicker than TradeKing’s. Customer service has been quick to respond to my e-mails (less than 24 hours during business days). Zecco does not offer after hours trading (TradeKing does but requires you to call it in) which is either a blessing or a curse. There have been nights I wished I could have jumped in after hours. It does force some discipline though. Overall Zecco’s a very solid discount broker with great fees (or lack thereof). Remember though that you do get what you pay for. Don’t expect much in the way or aesthetics or research. The forums and blogs can be useful but I prefer other sites for my research and interaction with other investors.

Here’s a review on the discount brokerage firm, Tradeking.

Fees/Commissions: TradeKing offers a non–tiered commission schedule. All trades are just $4.95 and $0.65 per options contract. There is no minimum account balance. Mutual fund purchases range from $0 (No-load) to $14.95 (Load). All mutual fund sales are subject to a $14.95 fee. Margin rates are at 8%, non-tiered. Bond fees are $4.95, with a $14.95 minimum fee per bond transaction. Treasuries and CD’s transactions have a $24.95 fee per transaction.

TradeKing Fee Schedule

Investments Offered: TradeKing offers basic investments including stocks, options, mutual funds and ETFs. They also offer Treasury Issues, bonds and CDs. Contact a representative by phone to make Treasury, bond, and CD orders.

Platform Features: TradeKing’s platform provides useful tools include calculators, alerts, charts and graphs. Streaming news is also available on their platform. Other useful services include educational materials such as mp3s, videos, and articles. I believe podcasts are also available. Nice features to their platform includes previewing orders before execution as well as some useful tools such as a Profit/Loss calculator (unrealized and realized transactions).

Security: They use https web technology for login services. TradeKing is also an SIPC member.

Ease of Use: Their trading platform was easy to use, updating bid/ask prices and options chains constantly while you’re filling out your orders. TradeKing also automatically sweeps your excess cash into their money market sweeps account if you decide to enroll.

Support: TradeKing uses live web chat as a major avenue with customer service. E-mails to their staff were responded to within 24 hours.

Pros

• Low commission rates
• Well designed platform
• Responsive customer service
• No minimum deposit

Cons

• Extremely slow ACH deposits
• Not the cheapest discount broker anymore
• Cash isn’t accessible instantly (requires 10 business days after a deposit to withdraw via ACH)

Summary: TradeKing is a nice discount broker for novice investors. However, they’re not the cheapest investors on the block (see Zecco, Interactive Brokers, Bank of America). Their ACH profile takes 5 business days to complete a connection. First deposits via ACH take 5 business days to clear. Minimum waiting time required before trading: 10 business days. Withdrawing cash via ACH requires a 10 business day waiting period, thus not allowing someone to deposit cash and instantly withdraw the next day. As a result of the ACH issues and the not-so-low commission rates, I decided to withdraw my funds from TradeKing. If you’re interested in joining TradeKing, leave me a message so that I can issue you a referral e-mail from their platform.