Commission free trades for over 10 years? Sign me up please...

I have been investing in individual stocks on and off for over a decade now, and my primary and only taxable investing account has been at Scottrade all along.

I really had no complaints with scottrade, they have a very basic platform with good research tools. Also a $7 commission worked for me because i usually invested in multiples of $700 (usually $1400) to keep the trade to commission ratio down to about 0.5%-1.0%.

Every now and then, sending them a message about how other trading platforms were either providing cheaper commissions on trades , or giving out x number of free trades for new customers would also get me a few free trades. The only issue being that these free trades would expire in a month or so.


 I had to keep track of when they expired and sometimes i found myself looking to buy stock which was a bit outside my buy range just because a free trade was about to expire. Silly. Pay more for a stock just to save $7? doesn't make a lot of sense - but that is how the human mind works sometimes.

Recently i found out that another brokerage - Charles Schwab had an interesting offer going on-
Enroll and bring your assets over from scottrade and earn -

• Commission-free online equity trades for the number of years you were a Scottrade client
• $4.95 online equity commissions for the remainder of the time you maintain your enrolled account at Schwab

Now i have been with scottrade for over a decade, $7 commission is not bad, $4.95 is great - but no commissions on trades for over 10 years ? I liked the sound of that.

I decided to move over my assets to charles schwab, it did take me a few weeks to actually get to it, but once i started the process it was fairly seamless and straight forward.

Once i created an account, all i had to do was request an account transfer over from scottrade. After that i had to scan and upload the account transfer form along with my latest scottrade statement (i could have dropped it off at any charles schwab branch instead). After they verified it (in a day or so), it took exactly a week for the account (stock plus any cash) to be transferred over to the new brokerage.

During this time, i avoided doing any trades. A representative from charles mentioned that they will keep sweeping my scottrade account for 6 months to make sure all dividends etc that might go the old account will be automatically transferred over. It has been a few weeks and the transfer has been seamless, with no missed dividend payment.

Scottrade did charge me a $75 fee for moving my account over in its entirety. I had called schwab before initiating the move and they said they would reimburse me that one time fee as well. Which they did. Sweet.

In the few weeks i have been with charles schwab, i have noticed that their platform is much better than what scottrade had to offer. The research tools are good, and the overall interface is much more modern and pleasant to work with.

It now also gives me the flexibility to add stocks in smaller batches if i so like, since i don't try to account for the trade commission either while buying or selling (if i have to, like i recently did)

One rather big positive that i miss from scottrade is the time taken to transfer money from an external bank account to the brokerage. With scottrade the money would show up instantaneously after setting up the transfer and you could execute a trade within a couple of minutes if you had to take advantage of good value in the market on a certain day. Here - the money is transferred the next day. It might not be a big deal for most, but i have to compensate for that by keeping some dry powder in the brokerage account for such scenarios.

I have not been compensated or asked to write this post by any company, this is just my personal experience and opinions. If you are interested, here is the link to that promotion. This works right now , but i am not sure if they have a time limit on this offer, nothing on that page mentions it. I would recommend calling them and confirming this in case you are curious and want to switch as YMMV.