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We started using Scottrade in 2007 and we're really enjoying the convenience at our house. One interesting site that we have not yet tried is Zecco, which has a certain number of zero commission trades each month. In the early 90s we used Schwab for mutual funds, but we honestly liked the commissions at Scottrade and the founder did seem quite sincere in his humourous commercials. But mostly it was the low low commissions and being able to walk into their office that made our decision.

Because Scottrade is only a few miles away, we could visit their physical office quite easily. We turned in some paperwork and wrote our initial check on the first office visit. As we have become more comfortable with online investing, we will probably put money into Zecco this year. They have a $2500.00 minimum at this time. As far as I know, Zecco does not have plans to open physical offices near us, if they do that at all.

Make sure you get all the proper paperwork done and speak to the right people if you are transferring monies from one institution to another. We had put money into a Roth IRA in 2005 at our credit union and it took about a month for the money to be transferred [which was our second deposit to Scottrade].

We bought Timberland (TBL) in April and it fell nicely in a few weeks and has not fully recovered yet. It's not fun to see your first stock fall in the 25% or more range, but we had committed to holding it for about 12 months or so. That's part of our discipline of value investing and that will be covered in a subsequent article. Late August we started a buying binge and by late September we had 11 stocks and were fully invested. All our transactions went smoothly and within seconds we could see the total price we paid, price per share and other relevant information. We had just over 1/10th of 1% left in cash. I created a blog at http://BusinessOwnerInvestment .blogspot.com for anyone who wants to follow our progress or get more confidence before they jump into online investing. I will create links on the blog for those who want to visit my articles on Helium.

We bought PortalPlayer (PLAY) on September 5, 2006 and the company was bought by NVIDIA (NVDA). I wasn't sure if we would receive NVIDIA shares or cash and I got the answer on January 10, 2007. We got cash and so effectively sold our shares without incurring commissions. Our return during the time we owned PortalPlayer was 9.49%. Scottrade's back office has helpful functions like Gainskeeper(TM), which

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