BellaOnline Forums Money Investing etrade vs Vanguard

Many years ago I volunteered at GeoCities and when they went public they gave all their volunteers stock. So that was a lovely present to us!

The way they gave us our stock was to put it into an eTrade account, so in essence I got an instant eTrade account when that happened. I've maintained it ever since.

Now that I'm pondering Vanguard, I'm wondering if I should move that account over into the vanguard system. As it is I had a few shares (and I mean a tiny few) in Google and Netflix that I sold a month or two ago. I'd bought them when the market was really down and they did nicely, but I decided I'd made enough and wanted to not risk it any more.

So now the question is what do I want to put this money into and do I want to stay in eTrade or Vanguard. First I suppose I'll have to see what the trading fees are with Vanguard. If I move my actual IRAs over to Vanguard maybe it'll be good to have everything in one place? So I'm more likely to keep an eye on it vs having to log into two separate areas?

OK looking at a comparison page, it seems that each trade with eTrade is $9.99. That sounds right to me. It's not like I do this a lot - I bought my stocks back when the market was super low (two years ago?) and just sold them recently. So I don't buy or sell frequently. It's like once every two years. But still.

Their minimum to begin is $1000.

On Vanguard it's $7 a trade. Their minimum is $3000.

So really it seems pretty close especially when I do it so rarely. So then it might seem I might as well be in Vanguard if I'm going to have my IRA stuff in there. I do like the idea of everything in one spot. It would encourage me to log in occasionally and look over everything.

I'm worried about hidden fees though. I already caused myself enough trouble by moving my IRAs twice in a row thinking they were "free" moves.

Maybe you should have moved your IRA to etrade, where have no minimum or fees for IRAs and they would have reimbursed for any fees incurred from a transfer.

If you insist on using mutual funds, the move to Vanguard makes sense. However, ETFS I believe are vastly superior to mutual funds with lower fees than most funds (although it's close to Vanguard's fees). They offer much more flexibility and make diversification so easy.