Overall, Zecco is a suitable choice for beginners as well as small retail investors who prefer discount trading. Zecco is beneficial if you want to take occasional exposure in options along with discounted rates for stock, ETFs and Funds. They do not have any account opening charges, so you can always try them by opening an account for free. Zecco is a large brokerage with its client base exceeding 400,000 investors. Moreover, Zecco offers a Trading Simulator free of cost to all clients. The website has little information, so you have to spend time to look for what you want.
For detailed information, browse through our detailed reviews below.
What Type of Accounts you can open with Zecco?
Zecco offers a whole host accounts to choose from. You can easily find the one that suits your needs. Popular accounts that you can open with Zecco are Individual, Joint and Custodial.
The list of all accounts that you can open with Zecco is:
- Individual Account
- Joint Account
- Custodial Account
- Retirement Accounts: Traditional IRA | Roth IRA | Rollover IRA |
- LLC Account
- Trust Account
- Sole Proprietorship Account
- Investment Club Account
- Partnership Account
- Corporate Account
Zecco offers the following selection of investment products:
- Stocks
- Options
- Mutual funds
- Bonds
- CDs
- Forex
- Treasuries
- ETFs
Zecco’s: Fees & Commissions
One cannot wary that commissions are the key cost of investing, but one interesting fact is that the size of commission influences your trade decisions. Let’s understand their pricing structure.
- Zecco is a low-cost brokerage for trading in stocks and ETFs. Their commissions are much lower than industry peers. They only charge $4.95 for online trades in stocks and ETFs.
- For broker-assisted stock and ETF trades Zecco charges $19.99, and there isn’t any limit on the quantity traded. These trades are placed through their customer service.
- For Extended Hours Trading Zecco charges an additional $0.005/share along with the base charge.
- Options can be traded at $4.95 along with an additional per contract charge of $0.65. Both, options assignments and options exercises can be done at $4.95.
Margin trading can be done at competitive rates with Zecco. Depending upon the size of your account the applicable margin rate can be anywhere between 3.75% and 7.75%.
Zecco’s Tools and Platform Performance
In past few years Zecco has completely transformed itself and now it offers trade and research tools that are quite simple to use yet competitive with their competitors’ offerings.
Tools offerd by Zecco are:
- Zecco Screeners: Zecco offers easy to use market screeners that can help you to identify and harness the best stock, ETF and Fund opportunities that match your investment criteria. Like most popular discount brokerages, even Zecco offers screeners with cutting-edge technology, but what really makes their offering distinct is the option to screen markets using more than 50 filters.
- Quotes: Zecco features data providers such as Lipper, FactSet, Briefing.com and Comtex. These names are well known for providing reliable and timely information.
- Zecco’s Options Strategy Builder: Options strategy builder lets you select an options strategy that best suits your risk tolerance. You can use this tool to calculate underlying stock price movement based on fluctuations in volatility. You can even make calculations assuming different scenarios.
- Zecco’s GainsKeeper: This is a premium tool that helps you in understanding tax implications and lets you analyze portfolio performance.
- Quotestream II: This is yet another premium tool that lets you monitor market fluctuations with streaming Level 2 data in real-time. Zecco’s customers have to pay extra to subscribe for this tool.
- Zecco Streamer Review: This is a free version and gives you the option of streaming delayed quotes on almost all exchanges.
How good is Zecco’s Customer Service and Support?
Zecco offers Phone, email and Live Chat support, and they are pretty good at solving customers’ problems. Although, you would find that their Live Chat support is mostly busy. Their licensed representatives are good at what they do and their full team is available from 8am to 7pm on weekdays. You can even contact them on Sundays 10:30am to 7pm through chat and email.
Zecco’s Educational Support for traders
Zecco has a good content for the traders on its website.
- Stock Trading Education: Zecco’s provides extensive education support and learning programs that help traders upgrade themselves and their trading experience. They aim at imparting rational tips and strategies that will help you build up a well-organized portfolio and to sharper your trading skills. With some highly engaging and useful videos, learning minute details for better trading becomes achievable.
- Options Trading Education: For options traders, Zecco provides a specialized trading education prospect that will guide you pick up the right stocks at the right time and define its near future moves. Zecco’s Options Trading Strategies are pretty coherent and advantageous for options traders to make money on their options positions.
- Zecco’s Investment Community: ZeccoShare allows its members to interact online and share trades, investment ideas and much more with other traders. Only a few brokerages offer the community advantage. You can share investment ideas and compare portfolios, and at the same time take advantage of blogs and forums. You can even track the publically shared trades of other members of the community.
Miscellaneous information about Zecco
In the past Zecco was popularly known as a Zero Commission Broker. Now, they no longer offer free trades, but the recent improvements have been significant as far as the user experience goes.
You can fund your Zecco trading account in any of the following ways:
- Link a Bank Account (Establish ACH)
- Through Cheque deposit
- Using Wired Transfer
- Transferring another Brokerage Account to Zecco Trading Account
23 April 2012
DO NOT use this brokerage if you’re a DAY TRADER.
I’d been using this since 2011 until recently, their system has encountered multiple problems. I bought a security and it turns out I can’t sell it online because they have technical issues, so I have to call which took almost 20mins and price has gone down. It happened to me February then again last Friday 4/20. Once is acceptable 2 is Foolishness. So I am closing my account!!
07 April 2011
Zecco is a bait and switch company. They changed their rates by a large amount and then stuck their customers with the ACAT fee for leaving even though they changed their rates!! At any time they can freeze your account and bar access to your stocks and they’ve done it numerous times, it’s in their contract. They have lied to me and their own holding bank in an effort to try and force me to stay with them. They are completely unethical and the worst business I have encountered. They make bank of america look friendly.
04 April 2010
Hey, Zecco Trader,
What is wrong with Zecco, what made you say they are a scam? I have heard positive reviews about Zecco from lot of people. Obviously you would not compare TD Ameritrade with Zecco because Zecco charges you 50% of what TD Ameritrade charges. Just keep that in mind. Post more details about your investments here so that others can benefit from your experience.
Thanks for stopping by.
03 March 2010
Zecco Trading sucks, their customer service is not helpful at all. They are a scam
20 May 2009
Equity trades at Zecco cost $4.50 each and trades cost $4.95 at TradeKing. The difference is only $0.45 per trade, which isn’t much when you only make a few trades per month. The difference comes with the extras – Zecco charges $50 a year for their GainsKeeper tool, which tracks your realized and unrealized gains – it’s a great tool for maximizing your tax strategy as you go. TradeKing features the Maxit Tax Manager which does the same thing, but is free. Zecco also boasts a host of other premium features, many of which require a subscription. Most of these aren’t very expensive for what you get, but similar tools can be found for free at places like TradeKing.
18 May 2009
"During the first day my zecco account was open I made 4 trades on the Zecco Platform. I bought 4 shares of 4 different dividend stocks ranging from small with low volume to high with large volume.The Order Entry Interface is not rocket science to figure out and I found it to be responsive and easy to use.
You do Have a surprising large number of the types of trades you can perform with a basic zecco brokerage account including: Market, Limit, Stop, Stop Limit, Trailing Stop. You can perform any of these types that are applicable when Buying, Selling, Shorting, or covering. Considering I don’t feel that I am a sophisticated enough technical investor yet to need much more than the Buy and Sell buttons, this was great."