I don’t understand your logic? I pay a very small amount per automatic trades for my balanced 6 ETF portfolio ($2 per position per month). But if Zecco is willing to give it for free, why wouldn’t I?

The only basis I can come up with is – the mutual fund company will let you do it for free? But I only have my qualified money with a mutual fund and NQ with ETFs.

Please Explain (with or without analogies to wonderful Buffets)

How about those among us who take advantage of these alleged lagniappes? Presumably there aren’t enough such operators to make it unprofitable to offer so-called “deals,” but….

In college, my roomie & I used to hang out with the four guys who rented the apt next door, two of whom were athletes and the other two of whom were no pikers in the calorie-burning department. They had scoped out every all-you-can-eat joint in the city, and every now & then they would invite us girls to join them at the trough. Their capacity for shoveling in food defied belief. The football player, in particular, was a champion chowhound: one evening he went back five times to stack his plate halfway to the ceiling.

It made me feel guilty to take more than one plateful, lest the proprietors go broke.

More recently, I took up with The Emperor of Cheap, who for a while imagined himself to be a mighty fine gambler. He spent enough time at the poker tables in Laughlin, Nevada, to land us free hotel rooms AND whole weekends of comped breakfasts, lunches, and dinner. To the rational, it seemed like hanging a sign around his neck: “Please! Take advantage of me!” However, that’s not what happened at all.

He would budget a certain amount of cash for gambling — far less than you or I would consider reasonable to spend on a two- or three-day out-of-town vacation at a nice hotel — and when that was gone, he would stop. The fact that he stopped betting at the tables on, say, Saturday morning did not negate the free room on Saturday night or the free breakfast Sunday morning.

Poker is a game of chance and skill. As a practical matter, to the extent poker requires skill, he was pretty good at it. And sooo…. He often managed to make his gambling budget go quite a long way — apparently far enough to convince the casino proprietors that they had a pigeon on their hands, because even though he never exceeded his budget, they kept on offering him hotel and meal comps.

While you certainly are right that only the Dumb and the Feckless accept these “gifts” naively, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Wily and the Gluttonous can use them to their advantage.