warning: Sharebuilder deal troublesome

[bri]

I just got credited the $50, however there is no option on the account page to sell stocks besides the 'real-time' trade which is $19.95/trade!! Then to cash in you need to email them and they send a check to you instead of transferring electronically to your account (which i think i found in a FAQ is $20 or something ridiculous for a wire transfer). Thus total profit is $30, which is only a 100% return for me and i'm not sure if its worth all the trouble getting the money back out of the account..

[bri]

i was just emailed back these details: you must use the $19.95 real-time trade option only if you have more than one whole share, if its less than one share you can call them up to sell at no charge. pain in the butt.

[Captain Clueless]

Unless hour-to-hour trading is important to you, it's easy to spend a lot less to invest your extra $50.

Set up a "recurring" purchase using available funds for the stock you want to buy and for a day of the week/month that just happens to be tomorrow. Let the purchase occur, then edit your recurring purchase to suspend it from making future purchases.

You pay only $2 because it was a recurring trade, but that doesn't mean you have to do it more than once. :)

--Captain Clueless, custodian of my kid's college-fund account, paying $1 fees

[dag16]

Yeah clueless, but that doesn't answer the question of how to SELL the stocks...

[pete321]

This may get a little off topic, but for a better deal you should hold on to the stock.

If you do have one share and the company has a no fee DRIP (Dividend Re-Investment Plan) you could always have them transfer the certificate to your name ($30) and then enroll in the company's DRIP. From there you could make monthly investments at no cost (no more broker fees for buying) and use the power of dollar cost averaging and dividend reinvestment to make some real money.

Intel has $25/month min. and Coke has only $10/month min.

http://www.fool.com has some good info on DRIPs and http://www.moneypaper.com has a list of no fee DRIPs

[rcastillo]

19.95 is reasonable to make a real-time sale.

The "real deal" with sharebuilder is in the long term benefit of systematic investing and dollar cost averaging.

[Duckfan]

You may want to look into http://www.foliofn.com. While they charge $29.95 month/or $295/year they don't charge any transaction fees for twice a day window trades...to buy OR SELL. You can have 3 "folios" each having up to 50 different stocks each (up to 150 different stocks total).

While the $295/year amount looks like a lot, look at it this way...if you had to sell 15 different stocks at $20/ea in Sharebuilder, there is your $300. That isn't adding in the buy transaction fees.


Duckfan