To Zecco Or Not

$0 commision for any (well...almost any) kind of trade sounds pretty good. Specially when all you care about is individual stocks, index funds or ETFs.

So lets analyze before I dive into opening an account and do all my future investing (I use the word "investing" instead of "trading", because that is a core part of my investing belief; more on that later, probably later posts), lets see if we can analyze it:

The Good
Nothing beats not having to spend the $9.99 or the $14.99 every time you identified a good ETF to add to your portfolio. Say I have a $1000 currently saved ready to be invested. I generally buy ETFs and hate to shell out $9.99 on my Ameritrade account and would rather wait till I get my balance up a bit so that I can buy a bunch of these shares at a time. It has happened to me in the past and I have lost out on an opportunity to get in on a big temporary low in the market be it with fewer money because I didn't want to pay the trading fees (again later).

The Bad
A lazy investor should never be tempted to trade. The basic rule is, unless you need to, why ever sell what you have bought? You did all the hard work, you did the research, waited for the right time (a low, a pullback) to buy and now you let your portfolio be that way. When you sell from your diversified portfolio, you are forced to re balance. A lazy investor never sells unless re balancing or needs the money. I believe $0 commission trades sound too tempting and might make me trigger happy.

The Ugly
Do I need one more account? I am already guilty of treating my 401k, my RothIRA and my investment account as totally separate entities which is kind of a kick in the nuts as far as having a "balanced" portfolio goes (I am already working towards changing this). Do I really need one more account to save me around $9.99 every few months?

Adding another investment account would not be as bad though since I can always think of my combined Ameritrade and Zecco accounts as one. Just with two totally different interfaces and all that.....

And So
The odds are in favor of having a Zecco account, so guess I will be opening one later today. I have browsed around the website (in case you are still wondering, it's http://www.zecco.com), and the blogs and forums pages are kinda nice and interesting. That helps!

Just what you have been waiting for...

...another investing/stock market blog. Since the 17 that you have been reading already aren't sufficient enough.
If you haven't guessed already, I am a little cynical.
To be honest, I shouldn't be. As of writing this post, I have approximately $15,000 in my investing portfolio currently "invested". A couple of index funds and a few ETFs. In the next few posts, I will get into details about what those exactly are and how did I get myself into that situation. I recently managed to transfer an additional $2500 into the account ready to be invested as soon as I figure out where that goes.
The portfolio has gained around $1600 since I started actively investing which was around a year ago (10 months and a few days to be precise). This idea of "active investing" goes against the very basis of my investing theory, which is summarized as "Lazy", but more on that later (another post most likely).
What I am getting at is that, yes, this is another investing blog. I will talk about stocks and ETFs and mutual funds (which I am pretty sure I am never going to invest myself) and index funds, but not to educate or to preach. I am going to do that so that when I go back and look at why my portfolio is at where it is, there has to be some thought process involved. Lets see if I can keep an account of that through this.
Hopefully in future, when I look at my Roth IRA account and see 3 stocks of Symantec (SYMC), sitting at 32% loss, I don't scratch my head and wonder.....what was I thinking?