Zecco Slaps Wells Fargo

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 13, 11:54AM EST

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In a strongly worded press release, free trading company Zecco went after the new Well Fargo 100 free trade program.

Zecco Disputes Wells Fargo’s Claim to be Best Commission-Free Online Trading

Wells Fargo Restricts to a Few What Zecco Provides to All

Burlingame, California

Zecco.com, the industry’s first zero commission online trading site, points out that Wells Fargo’s new offer requires a high balance and gives investors too few free trades.

“We are pleased to welcome another legacy bank with a half hearted offer to the free trade community, but its too little, too late,” says Jeroen Veth, CEO of Zecco, which offers up to 480 stock trades per year with a minimum balance of as little as $0. “The old-school banks are trying to get into the free trading game, but all of them have a huge catch and none of them deliver value to investors like Zecco.”

Wells Fargo requires $25,000 in combined balances and gives customers only 100 trades per year. Bank of America requires $25,000 in uninvested cash, which can generate up to $1,000 per year of profit for them or more. And, both of them charge an additional account fee: $100 per year for Bank of America and $60 per year for Wells Fargo.

At Zecco, there are no catches. You can open a regular brokerage account and get up to 40 free trades per month with a minimum balance of $2500 in assets (and that’s NOT $2500 in cash). What’s more, you can open an IRA with $0 minimum balance and get up to 40 free trades per month.

Comparison of Free Trading Brokerage Accounts

	Zecco	Wells Fargo	Bank of America
Stock Commissions	$0 (up to 480 per year)	$0 (up to 100 per year)	$0 (up to 360 per year)
Minimum to qualify	$2,500 assets in a brokerage account ($0 assets in an IRA)	$25,000 assets in combined accounts	$25,000 in UNINVESTED cash in combined accounts
Penny Stocks	$0	Greater of $24.95 or 2.5% of principal	$0
Options Commissions	$3.50 plus $0.60 per contract	$9.95 + $1.00 per contract	$19.95 + $1.50 per contract
Annual Fee	$0 in regular brokerage accounts	$60 per year (with certain exemptions)	$100 per year (with certain exemptions)

Note: Zecco offers up to 10 free trades per day, 40 free trades per month.

www.zecco.com

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.