Sharebuilder
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
There are many different investment services out there to choose from. Most tend to be geared towards the experienced trader who wants to use limits and stops in their trades. Well Sharebuilder.com is one of the few sites that is geared to a more novice audience. Sharebuilder, which I believe has recently joined forces with ING Direct offers investors to set up up automatic investments that allow them to purchase stocks in whole dollar amounts instead of individual shares. By doing this, beginning investors can invest in partial shares of Google or Apple instead of having to throw down a bunch of cash for a single share.
Through the program, you schedule Sharebuilder to make regular investments in a given stock on a certain day each month or week. One negative thing about this system is that you cannot specify an exact time to initiate a trade. At some point in time during the trading day, Sharebuilder will acquire the shares for you. A good thing about this plan though is that it allows you to make regular investments in a given security. This will allow you to be able to smooth out price fluctuations since you will be investing over a wide range of times.
Sharebuilder also offers some standard brokerage features as well. For an additional price you can make trades in real time just like you would with a more “full-service” broker. They also offer options trading and margin accounts as well.
Don’t you hate it when you find this great stock to invest in only to find out that your available cash balance is too low to make the trade worth it? Well Sharebuilder has a great feature that will easily solve this problem. What they have created is called Express Funding. With Express Funding, you can “place Real-time Trade orders with cash directly from your checking/savings account, eliminating the wait to process your deposit.” It costs $5 to do this, but if you have an Electric Orange account set up through ING Direct the fee is waived.
Sharebuilder has set up three different account types depending on what kind of trader you are:
As you can see, with the advantage plan you are essentially getting trades at $1/trade assuming that you make 20 investments per month. To my knowledge that tops most other brokers out there.
If trading at regular intervals for a cheap price sounds good to you, I would highly advise you to give Sharebuilder a closer look. For a direct link to the site, click here.