Problems with zecco trading (or why ASP.net sucks)

In few day of usage I had the opportunity to find out how bad zecco.com site is:

1) confusing. Stuff that counts is hidden. Real time information is horribly mixed with outdated balances coming from Penson’s site. I can’t even find on the same page which stocks I own and how much money I can buy. Actually money disappears from zecco.com website for a couple of days after selling shares.

2) sometimes not working properly. For instance, yesterday, when I tried to log-in to the trading part of the website, I kept receiving an error message. I could only access my trading account by using Internet Explores instead of Firefox.

3) demanding: you need a permission to blog on zecco. I have been waiting for days and got no answer to my blogging-permission request. I could set up this WordPress Blog in seconds, and without any stupid permission.

4) complicated: my old trading site was based on 2 simple concepts, money and shares. If I sold shares, I got money and with that money I could buy new shares. Too simple for zecco’s brilliant minds. They introduced the idea of “Buying Power”. I sold $2000 worth of shares and saw them disappear from my portfolio. Unfortunately I could not buy other shares because the $2000 did not add to my “Buying Power”. I was really angry until I fond out that the proceeds of a sell order will not affect my buying power until settlement, which is T+3 (trade date plus three business days), which is about a week!

5) time wasting: If I’m idle for 10 minutes, I am forced to resubmit 2 passwords (not one but two!). It is made in a way that my computer cannot do the job for me. I do really have to resubmit them if I spend 10 minute looking for info at yahoo finance or to look what other bloggers say about a stock. Horrible for a lazy person like me!

I am puzzled. I am very happy to be able to trade on zecco.com at zero commissions. I am also sorry for zecco.com. I believe that, if they don’t hire a decent tech staff, they won’t survive. Zecco.com has a business model based on collecting money sleeping in customer’s accounts ad advertising on advertising on the community. Unfortunately, to make a successful 2.0 style community, you need great site usability, reliability. Zecco’s ASP.net programmers were not able to provide either one. By the way… I don’t understand why a company which wants to offer free treading, does not use high quality free software available. I have noticed that most websites made with Microsoft ASP.net technology are clumsy and unprofessional. Zecco.com is no exception…

Anyway there is no reason to worry for my money. Zecco uses Penson , a large financial institution, for trading and keeping customer’s money and securities. My money and my shares are also heavily insured.

What may happen, unless zecco hires a decent technical staff, is that zecco will give up its zero commission vision and I will have to transfer my portfolio somewhere else in a few years.

From what I read, because of insurances and regulations, I see no risk of losing my investments, even if zecco dies.

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63 responses to “Problems with zecco trading (or why ASP.net sucks)”

deminvest

June 25, 2007

I found out what I should do to avoid wating a week to new buy after selling old ones: I have to transform my brand new zecco TRADING ACCOUNT into an even newer ZECCO MARGIN account. I have to do so even though I don’t want to do “margin”. I don’t exactly know what “margin” is. It does sound to me like a fast way to part myself from my money.

I am starting to feel that at zecco’s they hate us for trading without paying, so they give us bureocracy as punishment.

I can’t do it now! I have to rest a few months from opening my trading account. Maybe later I’ll be ablee to do the “margin account” upgrade.

Phred

June 27, 2007

Ahh man I was hoping to hear some good news from the Zecco lads about using that system!

You are right about .NET systems… bloated and over rated to hell! IT’s why I usually refer to it as .overhead! You could run that system SO much more effeciently on a LAMP server!

deminvest

June 27, 2007

Phred, you can use Zecco’s system. It could be much improved, but it works. I wish it was better, still the 0 commissions feature beats everything else!
I’ll continue using zecco and I will let you know when they do improve it. I totally agree with you: I also hope they’ll move on to LAMP soon

You’ll find everything I write about zecco on:
https://deminvest.wordpress.com/tag/zecco/

deminvest

July 2, 2007

Those people at zecco.com are totally crazy:
guess what…

THEY SEND A USELESS PRINTED LETTER FOR EVERY TRANSACTION!
THE STAMP SAYS IT COSTS THEM 90c.

When I see mistakes like this, I start thinking they’ll never make it.

Jonny

July 2, 2007

You are right on target. After deciding to give Zecco a “test”, I transferred some fund from my TDAmeritrade to do a test trade. I have had way too many problems when attempting to execute an option order. I could not place an order for 9 hours. And their customer service is non-existent. And they only “work” Monday-Friday. TDAmeritrade responds to you 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Zecco also do not provide trade confirmations via electronic means. They do not offer electronic statement option either. They hide their sweeps form from new applicants and don’t mention their sweeps option anywhere on their site for newbies who would not know to look for it like other seasoned traders would. The biggest problem, aside from horrid customer service, is the technical issues; way too much and way too often. It would royally suck when you have to execute a trade and Zecco’s site won’t allow you to do so. Good luck trying to call it in or using email. Non-online, assisted trade would incur a huge fee as well. Zecco sucks overall. It’s too horrible for words. Avoid it at all costs. Sorry, Zecco works, ya… but only part-time and sporadically.

deminvest

July 3, 2007

Jonny,

thank you for writing about your experience. I also had some problems on my newly activated zecco account. I described them, but they were not as severe as yours. Maybe zecco has improved the situation a little bit.

I still do advise everyboby to open a new zecco account. People who already have atrading account, like you and me, should keep the old one and use zecco for trades that do require small commissions. People who are opening a new account and want to start trading with small ammounts (under $4000) should also open a zecco trading account. On small amount commissions are much worse than some technical problems. An investors who uses $4000 to buy and sell 10 times over a year spends about 5% in commissions, half of stock market’s yearly gain!
And anyway nobody can be sure that doing a trade one hour late, the deal will be worse. About 50% of the times the late deal will be better!

Eric

July 11, 2007

Hey, thought you might be interested in knowing that the three-day rule is standard – both my Scottrade and Vanguard accounts have the same requirements as your Zecco account.
The process is called “Settlement,” and you can read more about it at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(financial)

Your Zecco “Buying Power” is just the amount of settled funds you have – Scottrade has a section that shows your settled funds, as well as your total funds.

deminvest

July 12, 2007

Erik, thank you very much for correcting my mistake.

I thoght that Etrade allowed to reinvest funds immediately. I was wrong. I checked again and found out Etrade has settlement days too. Probably I had never tried to sell and use the funds to rebuy immediately, so I made a wrong assumption. Sorry Zecco for this unfair criticism!

Tired

July 20, 2007

ASP.net does not suck. It’s a very powerful tool in the right hands, just like many other web-development platforms.

Don’t blame the saw, blame the carpenter who builds a three-legged chair. You are describing, mostly, poor business communication, business process design, and application design. There’s nothing inherent in ASP.net that drives developers and MBA’s to make poor choices.

e.g. The password stuff – ANNOYING. Why not a direct log-in for traders with session timeout management options? It should also be quite possible, if not close to trivial, to leverage existing code in their object model, assuming they used good n-tiered design, to create a desktop trading tool that enables you to bypass aspects of the browser-version. This could even be ad-supported. It could also do things like ticker your holdings, watch-list, etc.

My overall experience was quite a bit better than yours. I found the info on how the accounts work pretty quickly (before I got too far into an actual trade) and was able to fax in the documents that got things moving smoothly. I don’t want to “do margin” either, but it makes it easier to do a quick sell, then buy. Buying power returns without the T+3 thing.

In the world of zero commission, I fear what that could unleash in newbie day-traders. There’s no penalty for taking .5% in the morning and rolling it into something else for the afternoon even when you’re only dealing in $100’s instead of $1000’s.

Simon S.

August 3, 2007

I have been using Zecco for about a month now, and oh- you can bet that I appreciate the zero commission trades, 40 of them, every month. And as far as I can see, every one of you commentors are right:

The idea of Zecco- GREAT!
The execution of the ideo- Not so great, but still good.

The pages load at a reasonable speed, on par with most websites on the internet. But the real bargain- heh- is the stability and reliability. The site chooses not to load sometime, other times, a part of the page will load in a separate window, accidentally, especially in Firefox. The ASP.net coding is fairly competent, but is extremely far from production ready. Zecco, if they want to survive, will have to make an overhaul, not a major one- or at least some major patchwork(We know how painful that is) of its web system.

The brokerage part of Zecco is a different story. They are responsive, speedy, and is as stable as a Helium atom (From what I hear, that’s pretty stable.) My trades are executed as fast as they are from Scottrade’s, I can’t comment on the other brokers for an obvious reason, though. My trades aren’t executed any better than the previous sale of that security, if I choose to buy at ‘market.’ But that’s easily solved with a limit order (Which by the way is free, where other brokers charge extra.)

As far as I’m concerned, Zecco.com will survive as long as there are people who wish to trade for free, hmmm. Their prospects are ‘long-run,’ to say the least though, as they rely on word of mouth, etc. to get their name out there- That’s another way to save money! But it’s a slower process.

New investors, and those who have little money to invest, me included, appreciate Zecco’s existence, but I do wish they would revamp their website, it’s much needed.

– Simon S.

Scott Rettberg

August 11, 2007

I’ve been happy with the trades I’ve made on Zecco, and their website works, if not particularly well. Their customer service however leaves a great deal to be desired. I’ve been trying to get an account transfer through since March, and it’s still not resolved, four months later. They’ve been uncommunicative, lost paperwork, and generally incompetent. You do get the sense that the free trades end up costing you with poor customer service. I’m still giving Zecco a chance, but if they don’t get their act together soon, I’ll go back to paying for competence. It might be worth seven bucks a trade to know you can get in touch with a knowledgeable human being who will follow through on customer service.

BFeng

August 17, 2007

If you need your hand held for any reason, Zecco is not the place for you. With $0 trades, I think it’s unreasonable to expect any customer service except the shabbiest, crummiest service possible. New accounts should make sure they have all the paperwork and such approved BEFORE they actually put any money into Zecco. That’s what I did and it’s been OK so far.

I agree that the interface is poor. It was kinda shockingly poor because I was used to TDAmeritrade and Scottrade. The first few times was frustrating because I couldn’t find the trading platform after logging on. It turns out you have to log on twice! Once to your Zecco.com user account, and then again to your Zecco Trading account. The account numbers/names and passwords are also different, but fortunately I have ones that I remember.

The online balance summaries and stuff are also jumbled. I suppose they’re OK once you get used to them, but it is difficult to understand exactly how much cash you have left once you buy a stock. I believe the cash on hand is settled at the end of the day or at settlement (a couple of days) and all you have is the “buying power” to go on. I still haven’t sold a security yet so I can’t comment on that part and I’m expecting some learning there once I do.

Still, the site is usable and exactly what you should expect for what you are paying for each trade. ZERO! I have started to receive paper statements of each trade I made. I don’t understand why they would do this and how they can possibly stay in business doing something this stupid, but on the statements themselves, they warn that they will charge $15 for any security that is held physically at Pension (the clearing house). I don’t think securities are actually physically held anymore, but that warning nearly gave me a heart attack as it would apply to each and every stock I bought. I’m still keeping an eye out for hidden fees or costs, but I haven’t found any, but the way the information is presented is hard to track. I hope anyone who does experience a problem will warn the rest of us. Good luck.

deminvest

August 27, 2007

Bfeng, it will take about a week to get your cash a buying power after a trade.
I agree that sending those useless statements at every trade and spending to pay their stamps is totally idiot. With that money they could hire some good webmasters to make zecco site usable.

McNerd

September 29, 2007

deminvest – By “about a week” i’m hoping you mean a work-week, correct ? t+3 would mean if i sold monday i’d have my money on thursday, i assume. is this correct ? (i’ve never had this problem – margin is nice that way)

deminvest

September 29, 2007

I am not sure, but I think you can’t be sure to have your money before Friday.

deminvest

October 1, 2007

ATTENTION:
Zecco just reduced their monthly free trades form 40 to 10!

Zecco downsizes its free services. No more 40 free trades per month.

withheld

October 6, 2007

Zecco just instituted a new policy on free trades, You now have to pay 4.50 a trade if your balance is under $2500. A lot of uproar around this change on act 1 has caused many to think about leacing. The people are grandfathered in until the 1st of january which i see a lot of people transferring out. they reduced the free amount from 40 to 10 a month. There was an account where someone contacted them about the new policy and that person’s account was cancelled. Guess you can’t speak your mind. Many people are reporting they feel cheated spending a good amount of time trying to setup the account then getting the news that they are losing the free trades if they don’t go to the min requirements and also losing the free amount from 40 to ten. It looks like it would be cheaper to go to sogoinvest.com or tradeking.com or time2trade.com for a little more you may get a lot more.

Zecco S. Ucks

October 8, 2007

Terrible company. They cancelled my account after I complained to the SEC about their huge system failure in August when nobody could trade the Friday the fed lowered the interest rate by 50 points, with many losing thousands without being able to buy back into the market until Monday. Huge amount of people that hate this so-called broker. One guy had to sue to get the money in his cash account returned.

See http://www.zecco.com/forums/Zecco-Trading-10423_1.aspx for comments from other dissatisfied customers.

Alberto

November 21, 2007

The problem is not fully attributed to ASP.net, but to the slew of lazy developers who use it. I develop in both J2EE(Java) and ASP.net(C#), and I can tell you that most ASP.net developers that I have worked with are very lazy. They never want to learn the fundamentals, they just want to Drag-Drop and create crap software. Although, ASP.net is somewhat to blame for attracting these developers, since it promotes quick-and-dirty application development. The moral of this story is, beware of websites with an .aspx extension, especially financial ones.

deminvest

November 22, 2007

Thanks for your technical insight Alberto.

uvbenrut

March 18, 2008

Immense difficulty with the application process and then problems navigating the website – as stated above, very poor tech design. Jumbled usage, doesn’t function in Opera or Firefox!?!

ZECCO VS. VANGUARD

March 19, 2008

I have Vanguard and E-trade.
Vanguard is awesome but charges alot for people with not a whole lot to invest. E-trade charges less but sucks.
I haven’t tried Zecco but with 10 free trades a month, I just might.

Vanguard charges $25 dollars per equity trade (for people that don’t have a whole lot of money like me).
It makes me think twice before I buy/sell b/c I have to make at least $50 to pay for the fee.

deminvest

March 19, 2008

Zecco is much worse than E-Trade, but Zecco works and I am getting used to Zecco.

Actually zecco gives me what I need:

1) I login
2) I go to trading
3) I type company ticker and quantity of shares I want to buy.
4) I submit and immediately see my order executed.
5) I pay zero commissions

Bob Sanders

April 14, 2008

@#$%^ zecco: “The site is currently down for scheduled upgrades.” along with crappy asp.net error messages, or rather as another poster would note, asp.net error messages due to crappy coding, since 10am and I have a stock dropping, losing me a couple hundred bucks, far more than several months free trades! I will switch my active trading primarily to my sogoelite account ( one dollar trades although none free, 10$ monthly fee, extended hour trades); however, note that currently setting up account and making deposits require snailmail! Will use zecco only for my buy and hold trades.

up till now, three months active, i could live with the clunky site for the free trdes, but as noted above, now i’m losing more mony than i’m saving. grr

deminvest

April 15, 2008

Yea understand your rage.

And they are such liars!

How can an online trader “schedule” maintenance during trading hours?

One immediately thinks: ” Those idiots should schedule their maintenance on Saturday!

It would have been better to say the truth, that their stupid ASP servers crashed.

What enrages me the most most about zecco it that they treat us customers as fools.

Still, for my transactions that are always $1000 buy and hold, there is nothing better than free zecco.

Scott

April 28, 2008

If the site went down on April 14th I would suspect that they did upgrade the site on the weekend but when trading started on Monday that they noticed problems that required the site be shut down immediately and fixed. It is unfortunate and certainly not an excuse for being down during trading hours. But I would suspect nobody would actually schedule new updates to be applied during such hours.

sg1efc

May 18, 2008

I have been thinking about opening a Zecco account. Went and checked them out at the Better Business Bureau and they have an average rating. For a company that does not charge much fees at all, I think that the problems people have posted here and other places that I read, are to be a bit expected. Such problems do not seem extreme problems, to me.

Anyway, to calm peoples’ minds, they should have just worded the ‘scheduled upgrades…’ message differently. Posting a week in advance that they were planning to do scheduled maintenance that weekend and there was the possibility of additional site downtime, to resolve any bugs that might result from the upgrading process.

I have been using ShareBuilder. Last large order trade I did with them cost me an extra $200.00 in a large order fee. Time to give Zecco a try.

deminvest

May 18, 2008

sgle,

I am more and more satisfied with zecco. Zecco is definitely worth a try.

Adrian

May 19, 2008

They have made some recent changes to the website which seems to have improved usability. The 2-login thing sucks – you should not have to log in to the “forums” or “community” before logging in to your trading account. Little things like that still annoy me.

Anyway, the major thing I have been finding is confusion after sending them their “mutual fund order” form. I never get a reply, so sometimes I need to resend (even though they state that I should have received a reply the first time); and then when they get multiple emails (with the second one saying something like, “Hi there, did you get my order from yesterday? I have re-attached in case the email didn’t get to you”) – they go ahead and place the order twice!

Seems like they aren’t reading emails properly… which is annoying since they prohibit the placing of mutual fund orders any other way!

And on Friday, my stake in VEIEX, which was actually at around $33 per share, was presented on their site as “$0.33” per share… giving me a massive reduction in net worth for a few hours 🙂

Little things like this still piss me off. But you get what you pay for 🙂 It’s a good idea. They have to quickly resolve all these little glitches or they’ll go out of business. If they resolve the glitches, they will be a big player.

Gart

May 29, 2008

Zecco is still notorious in charging customers. I read that they are facing several lawsuites for cheating customers. Stay away from these crooks. I decided not to lock my money with these scammers.

Markethack

June 5, 2008

These horror stories are scary. I’ve been using zecco since january, and the only hiccup i had was that the site was closed for a few hours (during trading hours, which i thought was ridiculous. All in all though, i have to echo the sentiment that for people like me with only a few grand, the absence of $5-$10 trade fees is well worth it.

January 2008 – 5000
Today – 6000
# of trades, 35 (buy & sell).

Zecco has saved me oodles.

Aaron Hardy

June 6, 2008

Nice post. I’m still trying to figure out the “buying power” thing. I haven’t made a trade for something like 3 days now and my buying power hasn’t updated.

By the way, if anyone is interested in hearing about my Zecco sign-up experience, feel free to read my post:

http://intimateconversations.aaronhardy.com/investing/running-the-zecco-gauntlet/

Adrian

June 20, 2008

I have an update –
I am getting very negative on Zecco. Check this out: I needed to change the email address associated with my trading account. I had to print out a ‘Letter of Instruction’, sign and date it with the new email address and the old email address, scan it into PDF format, attach it to an email and mail it to Zecco customer service.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I get some sort of confirmation email out of it.

I am beginning to regret being such a cheapskate and signing with them. They really are making me nervous about the $10K I have invested with them!

deminvest

June 21, 2008

Adrian, our money is not on Zecco, it is on Penson. We should be pretty safe from that point o view.

Adrian

June 24, 2008

OK, well that’s good then 🙂

Here’s another ludicrous update to my previous post about changing my email address. They did change it (after 4 days!), but then they sent the email address confirmation message… to the old email address!

Jareed

June 27, 2008

NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

that is so stupid!

shadowtrader

July 7, 2008

interactivebrokers baby.

Mariam

August 24, 2008

Zecco Trading is fairly new but growing company. It has a great potential and promising future. It is monitored by management everyday to ensure quality customer service. To change your e-mail address or other information, you can go in to your trading center and click on My Information and Change your information. In some cases it might not let you change your information, then you have to e-mail or fax in letter of Instruction to make any changes to your account. Zecco Trading came a long way and it is working every minute to exceed their customers’ expectations. Thank you.

nat

September 12, 2008

Zecco holds money for 5 days when you transfer from your bank
So that you can’t trade when I want to…what’s the point of having account with them…SAD

zecco_sufferer

September 19, 2008

DONT USE ZECCO TRADING.

Their website online experience sucks.
Their customer service sucks.
If we place a trade during high volume , they just dont respond. I placed a trade ,they rejected it for no reason.
If we place a trade to sell at 4.5, by the time it executed it, the price fell down to 3.5 and you lose a shit load of money.

The experience is so frustrating. Please dont fall for discounted commissions because in terms of service/trade experience, you lose more than what you save in commissions.

SO DONT USE ZECCO.COM

deminvest

September 19, 2008

sufferer,

you are right zecco isn’t good for you, but after a year of use I can say zecco it is good for me.

In more than a year I have done about 60 trades, all for free. With any other trader, I’d have thrown away $600 in commissions. Considering that every one of my investments is worth a total amount of $1000, you can see how important it was for to use zecco.

Out of my 60 trades 58 went smooth as oil, were immediately executed with my full satisfaction.

On the two remaining on one, zecco wasn’t working so I lost a couple of hours and bough about 1% more expensively. No big deal 1% on my $1000 is what I would have paid elsewhere in commissions.

The other time that zecco delayed me, the stock I was buying did actually lose about 0.5%, so zecco’s delay made me safe $5.

I am now used to zecco’s clumsy website, I don’t need support anymore. Everything is fine and I don’t want to go back to pay commissions no matter how nice websites other online traders can produce!

I am going to write a Post about who should and who shouldn’t use zecco

deminvest

September 19, 2008

BTW.

zecco was totally stuck this morning. It seems better now.

zecco_sufferer

September 19, 2008

Looks like you are one of those suckers from Zecco who is paid to write these shitty things.

ZECCO sucks, and there is no doubt about it.
These days if you maintain some balance, everyone gives the free trades. not just them. Again, the most important thing is

“Please dont fall for discounted commissions because in terms of service/trade experience, you lose more than what you save in commissions.”

deminvest

September 19, 2008

1) I have an Etrade account and they don’t give free trades.
From what I read, only Bank of America gives free trades, but only for accounts offer $20.000.
Do you know some other company that gives free trades? Please tell me I’m interested, because I do not like zecco.

2) for some people zero commission are important, for some other aren’t. Some people own private jets, some take Greyhound buses. Not everybody has the same money. For me $10 commission is too much to bear, for you it may be peanuts.
Zecco is good for some investors (like me) and bad for some (like you)

3) I don’t think zecco would pay anyone to write a post titled: Problems with zecco trading (or why ASP.net sucks)

mike

September 19, 2008

Zecco has been beyond horrendous for me for the past two weeks. I frequently get kicked out of the trading center for no reason. Logging back in can be spotty at best. Yesterday, I canceled a limit sell order for an index call option, and for the remainder of the afternoon it was listed as “canceling.” The limit was far above the current ask-bid spread at the time I canceled. This morning, I logged in to discover that the trade had been executed late yesterday afternoon during the market run-up (more than an hour after my cancel request). Cost me at least $2k given today’s surge at the open.

Final straw is this afternoon — I have been unable to log in to the trading center for the past 45 minutes. That’s a bit of a problem during the last hour of trading on quad witching day.

Other than the one dangling trade from yesterday, most of these issues appear to be front end problems. In other words, they look like Zecco interface and website issues, not Penson trade execution issues.

That $2k (and whatever else I might wind up losing thanks to being forced to hold several positions over the weekend that I would have otherwise closed before the bell today) would pay for an awful lot of commission fees at a broker that doesn’t crap out when market activity gets a bit hectic. Bye-bye, Zecco. Nice idea. Piss-poor execution.

deminvest

September 19, 2008

you are right mike,

Zecco is working horribly this week. They simply can’t stand the volume of a nervous week like this one.

It took me 15 minutes just to login today

I think Zecco isn’t good for heavier traders who need to trade fast in difficult market conditions.

You should probably have an account for bigger and faster trades but keep zecco for smaller and slower long term investments

mike

September 20, 2008

Yeah. That’s my thought. I’m trying out ThinkorSwim since I’ve heard some good things about them. So farm I like their suite of analytical tools a WHOLE lot better than Zecco’s clunky interface, and the desktop trading center seems like a big improvement over the trading itnerfaces I’ve seen before. But I’ll probably keep my Zecco account active to take advantage of the low fees for my less time sensitive trades.

deminvest

September 20, 2008

I have an old Etrade account still open, but honestly I haven’t bought a single stock on it since I opened my zecco account.

I do also believe that, in such times of uncertainty about financial institutions, it is good not to have all eggs in the same nest.

deadinthewater

September 23, 2008

I’ve contact Milberg Weiss regarding filing a class action on behalf of Zecco customers due to the significant losses I’ve experienced as well for the past two weeks in not being able to execute trades when the market had peaked due to high trading volume. Nobody is making enough noise over this issue! We need to complain about this and seek restitution for our losses

Mike Childers

January 7, 2009

I know this is late, but on the subject of settlement: I have been using Scottrade and they have to follow the same settlement rules but they let me buy another stock immediately after selling one. They do warn about a FREE RIDE though. Scottrade allows you to buy stock with the immediate proceeds of a sale, and they will let you sell the new stock at any time, but if you sell the second stock you bought with unsettled funds before the funds become settled (three business days) then you have made a FREE RIDE and the stock exchange frowns upon that. Scottrade says they will warn you at first, and then cancel your account if you abuse it.

suhail

January 14, 2009

I’ve been looking around for an online broker for a while and zecco seems to be a popular choice on a lot of websites. But then i see websites like this one that are very negative of zecco. So I’m wondering if its just 2-3% of the users who are getting screwed by zecco?! or is everybody experiencing these problems?

Is zecco still plagued with poor web server issues?

How long does it usually take for a buy/sell order to go through?

Can I invest my money from a SELL immediately or does it take a couple of days?

Thanks

Belinda Tramwayee

January 27, 2009

I do have quite a number of problems with Zecco. Many times I try to refresh one of my account pages and all I get is an EMPTY SCREEN. This could lead to a catastrophe of my stock market decision making process. Yes! I also had the following problem. I cannot logon to Zecco, many times, with Firefox. I can only use Internet Explorer! My account number keep being screws up. Also, little amounts of money disappear without trace and without any trading taking place. Zecco should have a tag on your account that contains ALL THE CHARGES made to you. ALL OF THEM! Finally, during busy hours the Zecco interface is as good as dead. This can also be catastrophic as well. So, Zecco try to fix your problems. Hire a couple of new programmers and revitalize your web interface. TradeKing has no such problems whatsoever.

Milton

January 30, 2009

STAY AWAY FROM ZECCO. Zecco’s one upside is now gone.

On March 1st, they will increase balances for free trades to $25,000. That was their ONLY selling point. The customer service, the trading platform, the programming, all the WORST ON THE NET. I have never had a worse experience trading.

deminvest

January 30, 2009

You are right Milton:

http://www.zecco.com/trading/faq.aspx?tab=trading&faq=4

Zecco is just a good idea gone bad. Having to pay, zecco would be my very last choice. I will have to trade to sell all my stocks. So they will get commssions when I will close trades that i supposed to be free on both buy and sell transactions.

now I can say it loud: ZECCO SUCKS.

Donnie

January 31, 2009

If anyone wants to transfer out of Zecco, Sharebuilder offers a $50 a promotion if you open an account and transfer in at least $500 of securities from another broker.

Promo code is TRADEUP50

Sharebuilder has some limitations, but they do have more advantages than Zecco now. I’m a small buy-and-hold investor and their automatic trades ($4 each, or $12 a month for 6) work nicely for me. Additionally, they support partial shares so your dividends can be completely re-invested.

janie

February 2, 2009

I am about to cancel my account with ZECCO!!! No more of this slow execution shit!! I rather go back to Scottrade!

paul

April 3, 2009

and the sucking continues through april 2009

emmanuel

April 14, 2009

I’m trying to get some money out of my trading account… however the page ‘Other transfer Options’ doesn’t load up – regardless which PC or browser I use. Did anyone of you encounter a similar problem?

Brian

April 16, 2009

Personally, the only problem I’m having with Zecco right now is the wait on settlement. Although, it seems like the stock price at trade is 2-3 pennies too high at times. I do miss the zero commissions, though 😦

April 23, 2009

This why I trade at http://www.Sogotrade.com lowest commissions and real time execution.

Adam

May 9, 2009

I am having huge problems accessing my account. Everytime I encounter a logon or website problem, they tell me to delete cookies and temp files from IE. When I do, the site works for the remainder of the session, but then it doesn’t work the next day or week. Meanwhile, I have to re-enter all my logon info for other sites as a result. All this for free trades, and they’r no longer free….later! BTW, MBTrading.com charges the same as zecco does now. Anyone have anything to recommend or not recommend about them?

tired of zecco

September 22, 2009

I am done with Zecco I’m going to Scottrade this slow trade execution sucks the other day I put in a sell limit order the ask price was at $1.21 bid was at $1.19 last sale was $1.19 I put my limit sell order in at $1.20 I watched the damn price go to $1.21 back down to $1.19 and back up to $1.21 4 times. I made sure my order was accepted and I did not have AON. I eventually gave up and sold it at a market sell order oh that feature works great sold them for $1.17 so what good are 10 free trades if you can use a limit order it was only 2,000 shares but every penny was $20 so I figured that FREE trade cost me $40. That’s not the first time that happened to me . besides that zecco has no good tools you have to pay for everything . zecco keep your 10 free trades I have over $50,000 which gets me scottrade elite and the pro tools + trade execution that actually work yup I will be paying $7 per trade but I won’t lose $40+ on each trade buy and sell! Good luck!

deminvest

September 24, 2009

I read somewhere that with $50.000 you can get free trades also with Bank of America.

Personally, among many drawbacks, I didn’t notice slow trades. I always trade at market value. So far all my zecco orders had “immediate” execution. About half of the orders were executed at a better price for me than I could see 10 seconds later, about half where executed at worse price than what I could see 10 seconds later.

What I mean is that, even in the worst scenario of slow trades, there is no proof that executing second later will result in worse price and not in better price.

BUY, SELL, KEEP