E-Trade.   We do not recommend this company.  If you’re a day trader, you might look at this company.  For the small investor and anyone who wishes to buy and hold stocks for the long run, do NOT consider this company.  They charge extremely high inactivity  fees that will diminish your investments over time.  Our experience was the fees to be $40 each quarter for a yearly total of $160 if one fails to make a trade within an allocated time period.  It would seem that the free market system, that is so highly regarded by many, has, in some cases, a dark side component called greed. Most of the financial news of 2008 were incidents of greed.  Makes one think that this is now an American economic system component.

I just took a look at my E-Trade account and found that  company made all my stocks margin accounts, put a house call in for -$154.22 thus taking my original investment of about $1000 in three stocks and fleecing it down to $64.97.   It was my understanding that I purchased each stock, I paid in full, not margin.  They now say I paid about only 30% of the full cost.  That is a pretty clever alleged fleecing scheme.  I will have to go way back to prove the accounts were paid in full for each stock but that might be darn near impossible.  My original purchases were over 10 years ago.  I will have to pay trading fees, to get out of this horrible alleged white collar crime enterprise.   I will be lucky to not owe them money.  I will thus blog this “alleged” crime.  (Sept 17, 2008)

Our experience with another stock trading company, CUNA Brokerage Services, also charges inactivity fees but they are only $35 a year!

Update & Reflection:  Reported in the Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2008 (page D2) was a story about the state attorney general of Connecticut bringing a suit against the owner of the Crystal Mall of Waterford for allegedly illegally subjecting the consumers to inactivity fees and having to pay $309,000 in a settlement.   Our take:  Wonder why no one has not gone after E-Trade for their use of alleged excessive inactivity fees.

One needs to spend a significant amount of time studying the very companies that we use as a mechanism to gain profit, make our stock transactions, to see if we are not being allegedly fleeced by those same companies.

E-Trade is not recommended.

Updated: March 17, 2018