Charlie Rose - Sandy Weill / Anthony O'Reilly

I decide to start a series of collection of educational/informational clips I found online. The first one is an interview of Sandy Weill.

Brokerages' Fraud Protection feature

Let me continue my discussion on the selection of brokers. One recent incident illustrated that while the cost is very important in the selection of brokers, we can never omit the quality of the service provided. Just FYI, although this is not required by the SEC or Fed (unlike that of checking/FDIC or credit card), but the following brokers do offer some sort of fraud protection for brokerage accounts:

• Fidelity
• Ameritrade
• Etrade
• Schwab

Please check with the broker for details.

Checking, high yield savings and trading (II)

OK, let me finish this post before it gets too old. So if you follow my last post, and park the precious 25 grand green in your cash equivelent accounts at BoA in order to get free trades, here comes a bonus. In most states, BoA offered a souped up package for these cash rich customers. It is called "Advantage Checking", and the minimum to qualify without monthly fee is exactly 25 grands. I did not intend to run a commercial for BoA, so I won't copy the whole promotional material from BoA's website. But I personally enjoyed the following service offered by advantage checking:

1. Free checks -- this becomes less and less attractive due the fact that the new online bill pay are becoming more and more practical and efficient.
2. Free cashier check. This comes in handy sometimes. I suspect that you've got free money orders as well, but I never tried.
3. Free domestic wire transfers. This is indeed very help if you need to pop money into some brokers with slow ACH clearing. You will never miss another big surge on the market...
4. Free overdraft protection. With this feature, I will make a direct deposit in my high yield money market savings. Bravo!
5. This is really not a feature of *advantage* checking but all BoA checkings. But I still list it here in case that you don't know. BoA has entered into a lot of exclusive deals with overseas banks and you can actually withdraw money from a lot of foreign ATMs commission/exchange fee free! They called it Global ATM Alliance. For the full list, see BoA's website.

OK. Enough is enough. I really don't want to run a commercial for them for free. But now if you think this advantage checking is even more attractive than the brokerage free trades, you actually don't need to pop $25k cash to get this account for free. The balance counting toward the advantage checking is different from that of the free trades. In fact, both checking, savings, credit cards and brokerage present value in BoA brokerage count. For example, if you have $10k SPY ETF in BoA investments, $10k balance transfer on a BoA credit card and $5k in a savings account, you actually qualifies to get this service for free. Not bad, huh?

See Part I:
Checking, high yield savings and trading (I)

Wikipedia could shut within 3-4 months?

Well, I have to admit that this is not exactly a post talking about how to make money, but suggesting you to spend money. But after the astonishing news that wikipedia could close in 3 to 4 months due to financial hardship from digg, I was first really shocked. I am not sure if it is just an extreme method for them to raise money, but I really feel obliged to reach my pocket and make my share to have this gem float on the internet. After all, I have benefited immensely from this project and I certainly believe that by donating a small amount of money will benefit me in the long run, not to mention that at least you can get a tax break after april 2005 (Last time I wanted to donate to them, they were still not a 501(c)(3) corp).

Read

Fox viewers are more Chevy buyers...

Quote from a news report that Fox will start a business channel:

• A major advertising exec I know once confided that "Fox viewers are more Chevy buyers than BMWs." Hence, the lower ad rates for Fox than CNN. A business channel could be seen as an attempt to go upmarket.
  

Lol! I for one am not a fan of Fox-style programs.

Second Thoughts on Firstrade

I grumbled a little bit on Firstrade's price change yesterday. However one relief is that I just saw a post on their blog. At least they are willing to hear our complaints. So here are mine:

1. 1. As I said yesterday, I don't blame them for raising the fees. I am a firm believer that nothing is free and it has to be beneficial to both parties for any deal to last. However they need to improve their services. From my experience, their CSRs are not as helpful as Fidelity; funds transfers are rather slow at Firstrade, again it is instantly via Fidelity's moneyline. I can go on with this list, like that their website is not that user friendly; the portfolio feature has been broken for a couple of months already; they don't provide too many third party research...
2. Their NTF fund list is quite limited. Many excellent fund families, such as Third Avenue, Kinetics, Oberwise, IIRC, TRP etc, are not NTFs there but are free at a lot of their competitors.
3. There is no announcements on any automatic investments. If it is $10 as well for that, it is really a bad bad news for dollar average investors.
4. Last but not least, I hope that they can give a break for IRA accounts holders. $10 can be a substantial amount for a $4000 investment.

Still overall, I don't think it is a bail-and-switch strategy. I have been a happy customer and they have a great choice of funds. At least I have until April 2nd to watch and make my decision.