Monday, February 5, 2007

SogoInvest?

I have recently been seeing ads for SogoInvest, an online discount brokerage. They have advertised brokerage commissions as low as $1 per trade, for the first 90 days. Their regular commission pricing is a bit confusing to me, but I think that the bottom line is that their commissions vary from $1-3 depending on whether you pay a "subscription fee" and whether your trade is automatic or real-time.

I don't intend to go over the SogoInvest commission chart in detail here. But, from what I see, stock trading commissions are continuing to go down. In my previous post about comparing online brokers, I talked about the E*TRADE and TD Ameritrade brokerages that I use. I stated that when commissions dropped significantly below $20, I stopped paying attention to commissions. But, it is nice to know that there is still competition in this arena.

What does this all mean to individual investor? I'm not 100% sure. In addition to the brokerage commission, brokers make a profit on what is known as the spread. When you buy a stock, you pay the ask price, and the seller receives the bid price. This difference is usually only a few cents per share, and may be as low as a penny. My assumption is that this difference is divided up among the different brokers and the stock exchange.

In any case, I would like to know if anybody has opened an account with SogoInvest? How does it compare against the other brokerages that you've used? How is their customer service, and what sort of special services do they offer? I'm especially interested to know if anybody had a bad experience or other problem. I would like to hear your opinions and input.

PF Stock

1 comment:

L. Marie Joseph said...

Not sure with Sogo.

It's always hard to trust new companies.

I hear Zecco.com has free trades, few people I know said they enjoy the service from Zecco.com