Online Stock Broker : Discount Brokers
Perhaps you don’t need any hand-holding from a broker. You know what you want, and you can make your own investment decisions. All you want is someone to transact your buy/sell orders. In that case, go with a discount broker. They don’t offer advice or premium services – just the basics required to perform your stock transactions.
Discount brokers as the name implies, are cheaper to engage then full-service brokers. Because you are advising yourself, you can save on costs that you incur when you pay for a full-service broker.
If you choose to work with a discount broker, you must know as much as possible about your personal goals and needs. You have a greater responsibility for conducting adequate research to make a good stock selections, and you must be prepared to accept the outcome, whatever that may be.
For a while, the regular investor had two types of discount brokers to choose form: conventional discount brokers and Internet discount brokers. But the two are so similar now that the differences are hardly worth mentioning. Conventional discount brokers primarily conducted business through regular offices and over the phone, while internet discount brokers conducted business primarily through web sites. But through industry consolidation, most of the conventional discount brokers today have fully feature web sites, while internet discount brokers adapted by adding more telephone and face-to-face services.
Charles Schwab and TD Waterhouse are examples of conventional discount brokers that have adapted well to the Internet era. Internet broker such as E-trade, Ameritrade, Scottrade, and Thinkorswim have add more conventional service.
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