Scottrade Review – Popular Online and In-Store

Scottrade is a prominent online stock broker service with over 475 stores country-wide.  They make it easy to set up a first-time account or to transfer over an existing portfolio with minimal hassles.

Although Scottrade is mostly an online service, unlike some other similar services they have stores where you can get one-on-one advice from licensed professionals.  Part of the focus of their website is to help you find a branch near you so that you can get help in person and not be blindly stuck in the online world.

Reviews typically suggest that this is a favorable feature and extremely helpful for newer investors, since they’re not gaining their information from a website.  Users of the service indicate that getting their advice from someone in person gives them a greater understanding of what they’re getting themselves into.  Although there’s a lot of information on the internet it’s better conveyed in person, most people seem to believe.

This makes Scottrade a great stop for beginning investors.  But for more experienced investors, they certainly won’t be in the dark.  The website doesn’t cater to newcomers like many other services do—it almost assumes that the consumer knows what they’re doing.

It maps out things like minimum stock purchases, broker fees, and provides simple services like streaming quotes, up-to-the-minute updates, and so on.  It doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of other services.  It doesn’t feature online tutorial videos, downloadable content or cell phone apps.  It assumes the investor is either going to go into a store and talk to an individual or already knows what they’re doing.

Further evidence of this is that the website provides a service that compares any current investment brokers you are using to their own.  It analyzes your portfolio, your broker fees, and so on and gives an assessment, pointing out how they can benefit you.

Scottrade prides themselves on reliability, which is a word pasted all over their website.  Because they offer in-store help, they feel they’re a highly dependable option for anyone looking to invest.

On top of that, Scottrade opts out of having a minimum account balance and doesn’t charge inactivity or maintenance fees, giving them a big leg up on the competition.

Although their website is mostly straightforward, it does offer some information about the investment process.  It doesn’t leave everyone in the dark, so if you’re a first time investor and haven’t been into one of their stores yet, you can still access extremely helpful information from a link on the site.

Scottrade’s reviews are almost exclusively positive.  Most people praise the user-friendliness of their website and how easy it is to open an account.  Opening a new trade account through Scottrade takes less than ten minutes according to most who review the service.

Furthermore, people praise the diversity of the site.  Scottrade allows you to trade a wide variety of stocks, bonds, funds, and so on through their site at extremely competitive rates, which consumers favor greatly.  Similarly, they appreciate the low cost of broker fees.

Scottrade also offers a popular mobile phone application, which allows users to trade on the go.  With this application, you’re always connected and you’re always in the loop, so you can strike when the iron is hot and trade whenever you need to in order to maximize your stock trading.

The lack of fees also ranks highly among people’s favorite aspects of the service.  Although some users seem to believe that there’s a minimum account balance, which could be something that varies from place to place (the Scottrade website doesn’t indicate that this is the case).

Scottrade has also received several compliments from well-esteemed publications and sources.  Forbes consistently names them to be one of the leaders in the stock broker industry.

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June 21, 2011 • Tags: Online, Online Instore • Posted in: Credit Cards

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