OptionsHouse is offering 100 commission free trades for new accounts with promotion code FREE100. You must deposit at least $3,000 within 45 days and the 100 free trades expire after 60 days of funding. This offer expires December 31st, 2009.

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TradeMONSTER is a relatively new online discount broker in an industry that hasn’t seen a new entrant in a few years. I believe TradeMonster’s strategy is to offer relatively low pricing (not rock bottom) and a powerful suite of browser-based analysis tools. TradeMonster is owned by optionMonster, a financial media company that publishes market news and commentary on options and stock trading. If you’ve ever watched CNBC then you’ll recognize a bunch of the faces behind optionMonster (Jon ‘DRJ’ Najarian and Guy Adami are on Fast Money).

The aspect of TradeMonster that really jumped out at me is the first thing I’m going to review – paper trading.

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If you are looking for a high yield savings account to earn more money, you have come to the right place. This page will give you three of my choices for the best online bank along with their rates, a list of comparable banks, and between the two you will find a savings account that will beat your current one.

High yield savings accounts are the rage these days, with people pouring billions of dollars into banks and certificates of deposit. A few years ago, the only online bank with a high yield savings account was ING Direct. At first I was a little apprehensive – an entirely online bank with no physical branches I could visit? But they were FDIC insured and it’s turned out well. Since then, dozens have popped up to offer high yields because they run leaner than traditional brick and mortar banks. No branches, no tellers, no managers, no paper statements – all result in higher yields.

Enter in a new class of deposit account – the high yield savings account. It follows all the rules of a regular savings account except the bank running it is cutting costs wherever it can and passing it along to you, the customer, in higher interest rates. So which online banks offer the best high yield savings accounts?

Best High Yield Savings Accounts

Everbank’s 2.51% Bonus Rate

If you’re looking for the best rate you can get from an a high yield savings account, Everbank is the one for you. Right now you get an interest rate of 2.51% for three months, which is certainly among the highest, and the initial deposit requirement is only $1,500. You only earn the bonus rate on the first $50,000 you deposit, anything over earns 1.50%. EverBank, along with every bank on this site, is FDIC insured since 1998 (FDIC Cert. #34775) up to $250,000.

In terms of accolades, they have collected several in their years in the business. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance once named them the “Best Checking Account” because their yields were often 10X that of industry averages while Money Magazine named them a “Best of the Breed.” For five years in a row, Forbes.com named them the “Best of the Web.” This isn’t a bank that will pull a bait and switch, they’ve been here for a while and their reputation speaks for itself.

Ally Bank

A relatively new entrant into the online savings account world is Ally Bank. Ally Bank is an online bank that’s been FDIC insured since August 2nd, 2004 under FDIC Certificate 57803. They are a unit of GMAC Financial Services and was once known as GMAC Bank before changing their name in May of 2009. The reason I like Ally Bank is because they have no minimums on any of their deposit accounts, they offer plenty of options from an online savings account to no penalty certificates of deposit; all of which are at market competitive rates. They are certainly worth a look.

Click to apply for an Ally Bank account today!

Best High Yield Savings Accounts Rates

I’ve compiled a list of the best of the best FDIC insured (now up to $250,000 through December 2013) banks below.

* Everbank offers 2.51% promotional rate for the first 3 months, then 1.77% thereafter.

Are these online banks safe? Yes, they are FDIC insured and you can confirm that with the FDIC’s Bank Find tool. In fact, with all the bank failures lately, you might be surprised to learn that not a single one was an online bank.

I’m not sure how much it costs to execute a stock trade but it doesn’t appear to be all that much. When I first opened up my first brokerage account, it was with Vanguard. Vanguard has two main types of investor accounts, one where you invest in their family of mutual funds and one where you can invest in stocks, bonds, ETFs, etc. When I opened up my Roth IRA as a teenager, I did it with Vanguard and paid a then staggering $20 a trade. Twenty bucks! Nowadays, you can buy and sell a stock twice with TradeKing and still have twenty cents left over to get some Bazooka Bubble Gum. That’s a cheap stock trade right there.

So what defines cheap? Ultimately it comes down the dollar amount because you’d have a difficult time arguing that $12.99 is cheaper than $4.95. However, I think that just looking at the cost of the stock trade may be a mistake. Certain brokers charge you less but they offer you less in terms of tools, service, or both. Sometimes you have to review all the factors to make your decision.

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When Zecco first appeared on the discount broker scene, everyone celebrated their $0 stock trade commissions. I know it caught my attention, there are very few things that beat free. Even when reports of customer service woes rolled in, I still thought their offer was the best of the bunch. If you are paying $0 per stock trade, you can’t expect them to have an army of customer service reps there to answer your every call. You get what you pay for and you pay nothing.

Then I learned about TradeKing, which charges $4.95 a trade. $4.95 isn’t free but it’s certainly cheaper than E*Trade, where I was paying $9.99 a trade. Not only were the trades cheap, but TradeKing had been winning best customer service awards and best discount broker awards for years. So when Zecco stopped offering no-strings attached free trades, I knew we needed to compare the two straight up to get a better idea of which one was tops.

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For years, I’ve heard good things about Scottrade (mostly from people defending Scottrade in this guest post) but never tried them. I mostly use E*Trade because of their high yield savings account and TradeKing because of their low commissions. Since I don’t have that much to invest, it doesn’t really benefit me to open up all these broker accounts just to put a few dollars here or there.

However, since Scottrade doesn’t have any account maintenance fees and a low minimum ($500), I thought I’d give them a look to see what the fuss was about.

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How much money do you have sitting in a savings account? $500? $1,000?

Do you have plans for that money? If not, it should be in a certificate of deposit at your bank. If your bank doesn’t offer good CD rates, then you should open a CD with an online bank and take advantage of their better interest rates. If you don’t think you have enough money, you’re wrong. You can open a CD at an online bank with a single dollar.

One dollar.

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These brokers are excellent for stock equity trades as well!

As you may have read in my review of The Options Playbook, I’ve started to get interested in trading stock options. As has been the case with everything I try, I do a lot of research first and then I dive right in. As my dad always said, you learn in the classroom or you learn on the street. Learning on the street is always more expensive. I prefer the classroom.

In my limited knowledge of options, it appears that there are two main discriminators: price and tools. For price, it’s a matter of comparing the cost per trade and per contract. For tools, it’s having the ability to quickly make complicated trades without having to jump through too many hoops. In my review of the Options Playbook, I talk about two types of “plays.” The more complicated plays involve several “legs,” or options trades, that hedge each other and the better options brokers let you setup those plays with one screen. In fact, most brokers make that transaction easy because it results in more trades, which means more profit, so it’s almost not even worth comparing brokers based on that (remember, I’m a total novice in this so I may be wrong).

So, it may just come down to price.

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Another year, another Smart Money broker survey! We’ve been reviewing SmartMoney’s best broker series for several years now (here’s 2008) and it’s always valuable to see how the different brokers fare from year to year. In the 2009 broker survey, we didn’t see too much change compared to 2008.

Unlike last year, which featured a merging of the discount and full service broker lists (in which TradeKing lost a #1 ranking they enjoyed for several years), they didn’t make any big changes to the way they analyzed the brokers. (here’s the list if you want to take a peek)

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This is comprehensive review of the best online banks, specifically those with a high interest savings account and high yield savings accounts available (high interest refers to the interest rate). Given the recent economic uncertainty, interest rates have come down from their earlier highs and so “high yield” is more a relative term than an absolute one. Gone are the days of 5% and 6% APYs, today the best ones are in the 2-3% range. While not incredible, they are certainly better than the 0% your local bank is likely giving you on your savings accounts nowadays. In this post, Everbank, Ally Bank, E*Trade, HSBC Direct and WTDirect are given brief looks to see how strong they are in the current rate environment.

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