Zecco is a Broker Of the People and For the People

Zecco was founded on July 4th, 2006 in San Francisco, California. Starting the business on Independence Day wasn't a coincidence. The opening date was symbolic of their corporate mission. Zecco was founded with a singular, revolutionary idea - to democratize investing by taking away the friction of transaction costs. The truth is, trade executions have become incredibly cheap. There is frankly no longer any justification for a brokerage to charge $10 for a stock trade.

Commission Structure and Fees

Zecco charges $4.50 per stock trade. However, if your account balance is over $25,000 you will get 10 free trades each month. For options trading, Zecco charges $4.50 plus $.50 per contract. If you're a smaller options trader who regularly trades 10 contracts or less, this is very favorable pricing.

Zecco does not have a new account minimum. They also don't charge any inactivity or other account fees.

Trading Tools

Zecco has a complete array of professional grade investment tools, including stock, ETF, and mutual fund screeners. They have an options strategy finder, streaming NASDAQ Level II quotes, Gains Keeper, which helps you analyze your trading and the tax implications, as well a many investor education tools. Basically, they have anything you would need to identify, analyze, and monitor a trade, as well as a wealth of trader eduction material.

Zecco's newest piece of technology is called Zap Trade. Zecco Zap Trade is an internet browser plug-in that will allow you to instantly place a trade in your Zecco account while surfing on popular stock market and financial news web sites, such as CNBC and Bloomberg. If you've ever been reading a piece of breaking news and wanted to place a trade ASAP, this tool makes it possible. As of right now, the plug-in is only available for Mozilla's Fire Fox browser, but they are working on a version for the more popular Internet Explorer browser.

Extras

Zecco has established and active social community with their customers. You can use this community to ask questions of other traders, get ideas, share your trade ideas, brag about your successes, etc. This community is definitely helpful since the average retail traders works alone.

The other item that sets Zecco apart from other online brokers is they allow you to trade currencies, or Forex, in your account. Typically speaking, if you want to trade Forex, you'll have to open an account with a Forex broker in addition to your stock broker. Zecco is the only major online brokerage firm to offer you the ability to do both under one roof.

Overall Assessment

Zecco is probably the best overall broker for any trader that has some experience with online trading. Their wide range of products, state of the art technology, reasonable pricing, and peer to peer trading community make them a hard package to beat.

If you are brand new to online trading, Scottrade might be a better choice for you because they do a better job of hand holding, but otherwise, we recommend Zecco to most traders.