ShareBuilder has an easy to understand pricing and fee structure and they do not require a minimum balance. With ShareBuilder online stock trading service, you can set up recurring scheduled investment purchases. For example, you may want to invest $100 in a particular mutual fund for an IRA each month. This broker allows you to do so automatically.

Fees/Commissions        

ShareBuilder offers market trades for just $4 per trade (when participating in a ShareBuilder plan). Limit, market and option trades are all only $9.95.

Investments Offered        

This online brokerage offers stocks, mutual funds, options and exchange–traded funds. And you can set up recurring scheduled investment purchases; this is a great feature for continually building wealth and to help discipline you to put some money aside for investing. You can set the automatic investment for each month or week or whatever frequency with which you are comfortable.

Ease of Use        

ShareBuilder has many of the practical investing features the top–rated online brokers offer; however, we found the websites and features somewhat more difficult to navigate and use.

Trading/Investment Tools        

ShareBuilder offers research tools like company reports for third-party sources; criteria based stock search tools, watch lists, strategy reports and more. They also provide a “Market Movers” report, options calculators, EFT finders and an interesting tool that can look at historic prices that can show you what would have happened had you invested.

Support/Customer Service        

ShareBuilder provides online help topics and tutorials. You can also contact them by email or by telephone, their phone support hours are 8am - 9pm (ET), Monday through Friday.

Summary

ShareBuilder is a decent basic online service that has an easy to understand fee schedule and we liked the four dollar automatic trade option. However, we would like to see more customer service options and even though they offer reports and research, many other services offer volumes more.