Account Opening Grade: B
Details:
The Zecco welcome screen, showing their $0 stock trading offer (click on images for larger views):
We opened an individual account. There is no minimum initial account deposit. We selected to sign up for margin and options trading. Note the save application link at the bottom of the page. At any time users can select to save their application progress and return at a later time. Zecco is the only online broker that has this feature:
The acknowledgment page contains the account, options and margin agreement all in one place. This is very convenient for users:
The registration process is complete:
We received an email immediately after completing the account registration process informing us that our application was under review. Forty-five minutes later we received a second email notifying us that our account was approved. The email also contained instructions on how to verify our account by logging into the site and entering my initial trading key. When we tried to do this, however, we could not enter the key as the site said our application was still processing. We had to wait until the following day until we could enter this information.
Once logging in for the first time, we were prompted to enter the NASDAQ, NYSE, AMEX and OPRA quote agreements. To do this we had to fill in our personal information four times - very inconvenient.
During the registration process, we signed up for the ACH link feature to fund our account my electronically transferring funds from our Bank of America checking account. Zecco requires micro-transaction confirmation. It took two days for the transactions to post to our checking account. Once we verified the transactions, it took an additional day to gain fund transfer approval. Some other brokers offer more convenient electronic funds transfer initialization.
The following week we received a very basic four page welcome pamphlet. The pamphlet does not contain any useful information.
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