How To Choose A Share Dealing Service

Nowadays many people like to make their own decisions when you comes to share dealing, and so execution-only stock brokers are extremely popular. These share dealing services allow you to buy and sell shares for a small flat-rate fee, regardless of how many shares you actually buy or sell per transaction.

For example, TradeKing, one of the very best discount brokers, charges just $4.95 per trade, and Zecco, another popular discount broker, charges $4.50 per trade with the first 10 trades per month being completely free (providing you have over $2500 in your account).

So as you can see the cost of actually buying and selling shares yourself is now extremely small. This is important, particularly if you are only looking to invest a small amount of money, because it means that the percentage rise you need before you are in profit is minimal.

So what should you be looking out for when choosing a share dealing service?

Well cost is clearly a major factor in most people's decisions, but with so many online discount brokers to choose from, this should not be the only factor. You should also take into account your own personal needs and requirements.

For example, if research is important to you you would want to look for share brokers that have excellent research tools, and similarly you may want to go with a broker that has good charting facilities so you can see if a particular company you are interested in is oversold, or in a strong upwards trend, for instance.

You may also require additional services such as the capability of placing options trades. This is a riskier, but potentially more lucrative way of trading shares but if you are a more advanced share trader, then it may be something to consider because not every execution-only broker offers this service.

You may also want to go with a share dealing service that offers additional services such as the option of trading ETFs and mutual funds, in addition to shares in individual companies. Individual share traders are becoming much more ambitious in the kinds of instruments they invest in, so these additional services are now extremely popular. Also a lot of stock brokers now enable you to trade your own Roth IRA accounts so this is also another excellent feature to look out for if this is of particular interest to you.

Finally another two factors to consider when choosing a stock broker are reliability and customer service. These are extremely important because during the more volatile periods of the day some of the lesser brokers can become extremely unreliable and in fact you will find that it can become impossible to actually execute any trades during these times.

So you want to look for a reliable broker and one that also takes customer service very seriously in case you encounter any problems. This information can be hard to find out beforehand but by reading customer reviews on various financial websites, you will soon discover which brokers are better than others. For example, TradeKing is considered by many to be one of the most reliable brokers and has in fact won a top award recently for it's excellent customer service.

In fact overall TradeKing is, in my opinion, the best online share broker because it is reliable, has low fees and great customer service, and offers a wide variety of services including many of those I've mentioned previously such as the capability of trading ETFs, mutual funds and options as well as your own Roth IRA account.