About ten months ago I wrote a blog critical of Scottrade titled, The Reasons I’m Leaving Scottrade. Fast forward to today and I’m happy to report that Scottrade has been able to turn things around, at least from my perspective, and keep me as a customer. In my article I had outlined three key factors in my article regarding why I was leaving Scottrade:

  1. Lack of DRIPs
  2. Dissolution of FocusShares ETFs
  3. Check Writing Discontinued / Scottrade Bank Issue being forced on customers to withdraw funds via ACH

What Scottrade Has Done Since

I swear, I feel like Scottrade took note of my article and as unlikely as it may be, it’s nice to imagine that Scottrade took my article as an action item list for the rest of 2013.

Flexible Reinvestment Program

Shortly after I wrote my article, Scottrade introduced their Flexible Reinvestment Program (FRIP), settling one of my gripes I had listed in my article. Not only does FRIP solve the issue of a lacking DRIP, but unlike DRIP, FRIP allows investors to reinvest dividends into different funds/stocks than where the dividend originated from.

ACH / Check Writing Privileges Kept

I was emailed by Scottrade regarding my complaint of losing ACH/Check Writing privileges on my account. I was very satisfied that they allowed me to keep my check writing privileges and thus be able to transfer money out of my brokerage account via an ACH pull request from my bank without requiring a Scottrade Bank Account. This solved my second issue that I had outlined in my article.

So I stayed with Scottrade

Along with other reasons stated in my earlier written article, Deliberating My Scottrade Decision, I’ve decided to stay with Scottrade and make it my primary trading brokerage. Not only have I stayed with Scottrade, but I went ahead and added significantly more funds and converted my cash account into a margin account. Recently I’ve become a more active trader on Scottrade and have been using their Scottrade Elite software. Overall, I couldn’t be more satisfied. I still have my TradeKing account but the majority of my trades and funds are now with Scottrade.

If you’re debating brokerages, I highly recommend Scottrade. They’ve addressed my main issues and still maintain some of the lowest commission fees in the industry while maintaining great customer service via their local branches.

On a side note, if you sign up for Scottrade using my referral code, you’ll get three free trades:

Scottrade Referral Program

Related Posts: