Brokers With Stock Market Forums & Communities
Investors can appreciate a reasonably priced, simple-to-use interface for their investment activities, as well as access to educational articles that allow them to be successful in the markets. As an investor, you could certainly benefit from the advice and support of other investors. Many brokers have come to realize the importance of creating a support system and have instituted “communities” within their platforms. These communities give investors the chance to connect and interact with each other through the use of forums, discussions, social media applications and more. Here is a helpful list of brokers that offer such services.
Zecco
- Zecco has recognized the power of collective intelligence and has assembled a great community of investors known as ZeccoShare.
- Complete your profile based on your strengths and interests, and share this with the rest of the ZeccoShare community.
- Participate in discussions and forums, write blog posts, and respond to the questions posed by other community members.
- Get free access to ZeccoShare and ZeccoPulse (online market newsletter) with the setup of any brokerage account.
- Find other members with similar interests with the push of a few buttons.
| Stock Trades | Options Base | Options Contract | Minimum Deposit | Broker Assisted | Fund Trades |
| $4.50 | $4.50 | $0.50 | $0.00 | $19.99 | $10.00 |
TradeKing
- You can track the most actively traded stocks and options at TradeKing, and communicate with fellow traders on a daily basis by becoming a member of the TradeKing Network.
- Follow the top traders, see their performance and find out how they work by accessing the Leaderboard.
- The TradeKing blog gives you the opportunity to connect with the folks who run TradeKing, and allow you to share your rants, raves, opinions, strategies, outlooks and more with your fellow traders.
- You can express yourself and interact with other traders through TradeKing’s trading forums.
- The TradeKing community is where like minded traders can get to know others and where they can participate in interesting, varied investment discussions.
| Stock Trades | Options Base | Options Contract | Minimum Deposit | Broker Assisted | Fund Trades |
| $4.95 | $4.95 | $0.65 | $0.00 | $4.95 | $14.95 (no load) |
OptionsHouse
- OptionsHouse offers a wide range of access via social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook for its customer base, keeping investors connected.
- The OptionsHouse blog offers investors the opportunity to share rants, raves, positions and opinions with the entire OptionsHouse network, and encourages community participation via comments.
- You can subscribe to the OptionsHouse feed (and blog posts) to keep up to date with the OptionsHouse community.
- Access to the OptionsHouse blog, RSS feeds, and social media is free with every broker account.
- OptionsHouse currently does not support an internal community function, but keeps connected to its investor base via social media.
| Stock Trades | Options Base | Options Contract | Minimum Deposit | Broker Assisted | Fund Trades |
| $3.95 | $8.50 | $0.15 | $0.00 | $3.95 | $9.95 |
tradeMONSTER
- tradeMONSTER has a Twitter and RSS feed, so it's easy to stay connected with corporate. These feeds are available to keep you connected to the latest tradeMONSTER news.
- There's also a tradeMONSTER blog to read up on announcements and discussions on relevant topics.
- tradeMONSTER has a Facebook page which helps to connect investors and communicate up to the minute broker news.
- While tradeMONSTER lacks a forum but has a social media presence.
| Stock Trades | Options Base | Options Contract | Minimum Deposit | Broker Assisted | Fund Trades |
| $7.50 | $0.00 | $0.50 | $2,000.00 | $7.50 | $0.00 - $15.00 |
LightWave Trading Platform
- Get access to the TradingViews Website and gain insights from veteran trainers and guest contributors by reading their articles and blogs.
- Get access to an active Web Community and network with other traders around the country in their members-only Community.
- Expect seamless trade execution through LightWave's brokerage
- You can participate in LightWave's Daily Live Webcasts that feature 8 hours of chart analysis and market commentary from expert trainers.
- Receive access to data feeds. Equity data feeds are from U.S. exchanges only; Canadian feeds will incur an additional charge.
- There is virtual trading support. You can participate in paper trading through LightWave.
- Find top support via LightWave's knowledgeable team. Their staff is dedicated to help you find success with your trading and investing endeavors.
Interactive Brokers
- Interactive Brokers offers a live chat platform where you can ask questions, view comments and connect with trading and other specialists. Check out their IB Chats and Bulletin Board.
- The Interactive Brokers' unmoderated discussion forum allows you to share ideas, ask questions, and post programming code all within the confines of the IB community.
- Chat sessions are semi-anonymous as each trader selects a chat name. Interactive Brokers strictly prohibits the use of secure account information in chat sessions, though strategies and speculation are encouraged.
- Interactive Brokers has also made it easy for investors to make suggestions via the online features poll.
- Interactive Brokers makes it easy to share tips, tricks and successes with other active traders.
TradeStation
- TradeStation offers a variety of forums including one that's dedicated to account support.
- TradeStation offers Trader Wiki, which provides user generated content that can be added, edited or removed by members of the community.
- Forum subscription services allow you to subscribe and receive updates to forums and discussions that you want to follow.
- Find it easy to share trading tips, tricks and successes with fellow investors, as well as learn from others’ successes and failures.
- One of the only brokers to offer forums that are dedicated to the trading of forex and futures.
| Stock Trades | Options Base |
| $6.99 - $9.99 | $1.00 |
Learning From Stock Market Forums
Forums and other community features are a great way to supplement your learning efforts. In the case of investment communities, such features offer investors the unique opportunity to get new perspectives on a wide variety of trading issues that cover technical strategies, market conditions, and specific investment products.
Forums provide novice traders valuable information and resources, and teach them how to avoid beginner mistakes. These areas provide a place for a novice investor to post a question and to get many different answers based on the personal experiences of each responding investor. This has an advantage over getting the perspective of only one individual (such as an online advisor), since you'll see a bigger and better picture with more input and feedback.
Advanced investors can also benefit from using forums. Many unique, successful and effective trading strategies have been developed by combining and organizing the thoughts and advice of many different investors.
These community areas also provide a place where people with similar interests can gather and hold discussions about anything that's relevant and topical. Discussions in investment forums can cover the impact of the economy, market news and even company scandals. Forums also provide a place for like-minded individuals to dish out about other topics outside of the investing world.
Investor members of online trading communities contribute to the forums as well as to other member-driven activities via mentorship, blogs, and even social media interaction. In many cases, communities are divided into groups that share similar interests in more specific arenas (such as equities traders, options traders, etc). These smaller groups allow investors to get advice about topics they are most interested in.
Discussions are another integral part of communities. Discussion boards are topic based instead of group based and allow members of different groups to weigh in on topics that may be outside of their regular area of interest or expertise. The reason that these are so valuable is that every investor has something to offer.
In many cases, social media applications are integrated into an investment community. These applications give community members the opportunity to interact with other investing pals via automatic feeds regarding their community involvement. In some cases, Twitter and Facebook posts can be automatically created while in other cases, community members initiate the process.
Last but not least, many investing communities include the opportunity for recognized professionals in the industry to contribute to a blog. This gives other community members the opportunity to pick up valuable information from noted experts. Blog posts are usually dedicated to tackling a particular aspect of trading or investing, and may not only offer an expert's point of view, but may also lend itself to discussion threads, as comments from other members are generally allowed.
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Choosing the right broker is an essential decision you need to make right before you start trading. So it’s important to pick a broker that supplies you with all the features and education you need. As it goes, when you’ve done your homework, everything else tends to fall into place.