Best Discount Stock Broker for large Portfolios

Portfolio above 25,000$

Account fee for Stock Basket Account is not a big deal because it represents a small percentage of your Portfolio.

Example: Foliofn charges 199$/year for its Stock Basket Bronze Account that includes 200 free monthly trades. This represents only 0.8% of a 25,000$ Portfolio and 0.2% of a 100,000$ Portfolio. Depending on your portfolio size, this is about the cost of an Index fund or an ETF.

For such portfolio size, Stock Basket Accounts are best with their large number of free window trades.

The free trades can be used to:
  • buy/sell stocks to rebalance your Portfolio.

  • invest additional money at no extra cost, even very small amounts. Stock Basket Accounts come with automatic investment programs (Dollar Cost Averaging).

Stock Basket Membership Fee Free Window Trades / month Trade Windows Market Order Limit Order
Sharebuilder Standard 12$/month
(144$/year)		 6 (Buy Only)
then 2$/Buy 		1/week Buy 14.95$,
Sell 12$		 18.95$
Sharebuilder Advantage 20$/month
(240$/year)		 20 (Buy Only)
then 1$/Buy 		1/week Buy 11.95$,
Sell 12$		 15.95$
Foliofn Bronze
(1 portfolio)		 19.95$/month
(199$/year)		 200 2/day 14.95$ 14.95$
Foliofn Silver
(2 portfolios)		 29.95$/month
(299$/year)		 400 2/day 3.95$ 3.95$
Foliofn Gold
(3 portfolios)		 39.95$/month
(399$/year)		 600 2/day 10 free /month then 3.95$ 3.95$
BuyAndHold 14.99$/month
(179.88$/year)		 Unlimited 3/day 15$ No





In this category, avoid Sharebuilder because:
  • their window trades are scheduled only once a week compared to 2 and 3 windows per day with Foliofn and BuyAndHold respectively. Mechanical Investors with monthly rebalancing cannot afford weekly window.

  • the number of free monthly trades is much lower than with Foliofn or BuyAndHold.

  • free trades are only Buy Orders. Sell Orders are at 12$ Market Orders. Even if you rebalance your portfolio only annually, it quickly adds up. Check yourself at the Stock Broker Fees calculator.

Between Foliofn and BuyAndHold, BuyAndHold is slightly cheaper but Foliofn provides few goodies well adapted to mechanical investing such as:
  • Ready Made Folios: these are portfolios following various mechanical strategies with automatic rebalancing. One such portfolio follows the famous Dogs Of the Dow. There is no additional fee to invest in mechanical portfolios except the premium ones following some Reuters screens.

  • One Click Rebalancing: you can trade all the stocks in your portfolio in one click. It is well suited to mechanical stock picking where you invest equal amounts into many stocks: no need to compute how many shares to buy for each stock and then manually enter the buy amount for each stock. If you invest in a portfolio of 25-50 stocks, this can save a heck of time/stress. This is also a great tool to overcome investor’s mental accounting bias and make sure you will indeed rebalance.

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