SogoInvest - $1-$3 trades - highlighted in WSJ today (7/11/06)

anyone try them yet?
seems good..
reliable??

timothy86 said: This looks to me an awful lot like sharebuilder where you your trades are executed in lump sums with everyone else's orders of the day.

I wonder if you can instantly buy stock at a cheap price with them or you have to wait like sharebuilder to get the low price.According to the complete pricing chart:
http://www.sogoinvest.com/Sogo/Home/pricing.aspx

All trades including market trades, limit trades and automatic trades are $3 each. However, "for trades of more than 5000 shares, the total commission cost is $0.005 per share". Not good for penny stock trading obviously.

it doesnt even have a minimum age to sign up...

what brokerages (besides sharebuilder) currently have sign-up bonuses?

I Plan on signing up

Has anyone signed up yet? Any reports?

I signed up. I already made a few trades. It works great. Only the one dollar per trade for 90 days!
After that it cost $3.00 per trade with no minimums or monthly maintenance fee.

Everything went smooth in opening the account, transferring money, and everything else!

This is so much better than Firstrade where it costs 6.95 per trade!

timothy86 said: I signed up. I already made a few trades. It works great. Only the one dollar per trade for 90 days!
After that it cost $3.00 per trade with no minimums or monthly maintenance fee.

Everything went smooth in opening the account, transferring money, and everything else!

This is so much better than Firstrade where it costs 6.95 per trade!
I presume the money transfer is using ACH? Is the money available for trading immediately when you submit the transfer or is there a wait time?

Thanks.

timothy86 said: The money is transferred via ACH - which means there is a wait, there is no such thing as a company that will transfer money instantly for free. When you transfer money instantly that is called a "wire." Most places will do a wire but you get charged.
If I recall correctly, Scottrade used to credit you the money and let you trade by noon if you submit an eCheck deposit in the morning. Of course you cannot withdraw the money until a few days later. I was wondering if Sogoinvest does the same thing...

I highly doubt Sogo is any scam considering that this is the retail presence of Genesis. Genesis is a pro-brokerage only, and they certainly don't BS their customers and have one of the best systems around.

scanchain said: timothy86 said: The money is transferred via ACH - which means there is a wait, there is no such thing as a company that will transfer money instantly for free. When you transfer money instantly that is called a "wire." Most places will do a wire but you get charged.
If I recall correctly, Scottrade used to credit you the money and let you trade by noon if you submit an eCheck deposit in the morning. Of course you cannot withdraw the money until a few days later. I was wondering if Sogoinvest does the same thing...

Interesting, as I never noticed that.
However, Scottrade’s echeck service was shut down.

$1 trades for 90 days appears to be their sign up bonus.

stateofmind said: Looks good, but think I will wait. Maybe they will have a sign up bonus like MOST other brokerages.

One thing that's nice about sharebuilder is that they sweep funds into a perfectly regular money market fund (BDMXX, yielding ~ 4.64% right now), and they pay the dividends even when the funds aren't yet cleared for withdrawal, as I learned when I accidentally transferred in about $10,000 for 10 days.

Does anyone know if you get charged when you cancel a pending order? I did this twice and it doesn't appear to have been charged.

So far so good. When I saw them in the paper I decided to try. Opening an account was easy enough. There are things I like and things I don't like.

Their research tool is really good. But that is free to anyone.

The ACH transfers take 3 days to post to account. The interest rate on the money in your account is lower than other online brokers. The real-time trades are fast enough for me but I have used websites that were faster. I think this will get better as they get more established.

The fact I love about it is there are no minimums for the account. It was easy to open. And for the first 90 days all my trades (market or limit) are $1. After that it is $3/trade.

I think that this website overall is pretty good. Not the best but certainly not the worst.

I am happy with them.

I agree, I don't understand what takes the transfer so long. I transferred the money on Monday morning (or Sunday night, I don't remember) and it didn't show up in my account till Wednesday morning.

It does have pitfalls, but I only have Sharebuilder and Firstrade to compare too. I think they are working of adding more features and making this better.

After all, they are part of Genesis Securites.

Does anyone know if you get charged for cancelling orders?

I have cancelled a few limit orders and I don't appear to be charged at the end of the day. Just wondering if anyone knows about this. It doesn't say anything on their website.

BTW, does anyone know if Sogoinvest does a hard pull on your credit report if you open a margin account?

OFFBEAT said: does sogoinvest allow you to re-invest capital gains?
I assume you mean dividends. I think the answer to that is no, currently. Came across this interview with the CEO here. Says IRAs, options, and mutual funds are coming in the next few months (with IRAs coming first) and that DRIPs are a possibility if there's customer demand.