No Cost Trading

I haven't traded individual stocks in over two years.  At one point I was concentrating a majority of my efforts in learning to trade the stock market.  I may be interested in getting back into the stock market in addition to trading forex but the question is, is this a bad time to do so? Considering the bull market we've had going for years now, I'd be a bit hesitant to start now.  Contradicting my last sentence, according to secular market trends (a long-term trend lasting anywhere from 5 to 25 years) we've been in a bear market since the year 2000.   Previous bear markets lasted 16 years (1966-1981), 5 years (1937-1941), 4 years (1929-1932), and 20 years (1901-1920).  Bull markets lasted 18 years (1982-1999), 24 years (1942-1965), 4 years (1933-1936), and 8 years (1921-1928).  Timing is difficult and when everyone is screaming, "we've reached the top" a lot of times this just isn't the case. 

For instance, I bought a house back in 2003 when the financial news outlets were warning home buyers that the prices couldn't go much higher.  I sold the house over 3 years later with a decent profit.  I didn't care what they were saying about the housing market because all I cared about was that the timing for me at that given moment was ideal.  I had the down payment, interest rates were low, and I was at the stage in my life where people typically buy homes (family, tax purposes, etc.) So my deciding to get back into the stock market will be for reasons of my own and not necessarily of the so-called experts.  Like I said earlier, I may be hesitant but we'll see.

The whole point of this post was to mention a stock broker that offers $0 trades.  From what I've read, a lot of the larger brokers may be moving towards this business model in the future and will try making money on other services.  The broker is Zecco.  In addition to their $0 trades, they also have no minimum balance required.  They were also mentioned in a column yesterday on USA Today.  Some of you may already have heard about Zecco but since I've been out of the stock market game for a while, I found it very appealing.  The next question would be where to find a low cost charting provider.  There's tons of free market data information on the web though as long as I'm not trading stock intraday but I'll continue to look further into this also.