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Originally Posted by Buehler445
What desktop platform do you use?
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I've got various accounts on etrade, schwab, and fidelity. All have different strengths and weaknesses, so it's nice to have all three. I don't do anything beyond basic long buying and selling, so I don't know how they handle options and short selling and stuff.
Etrade is nice because it shows a year to date return on each stock and the estimated dividend income for the account by month. It's got easy ways to look up stock news as well, and you can pull pretty old statements. I'm paranoid right now that they're charging some fees that I can't find, because my account always seems to underperform compared to where the individual stocks are, so that really bugs me. I can't reconcile price changes with the total account value. It's probably something I'm messing up, but it really bugs me.
Schwab is nice because it lists the dividend returns for each stock on the main account page, and I can customize the main account page to some degree. It drives me crazy because I can't list YTD returns for each stock, and the "portfolio performance" comparison includes a bunch of bizarre indices and doesn't include the main ones like the Dow and the Nasdaq.
Fidelty has some nice add-on features like a "retirement planning scorecard", and a main account page that is unwieldy but pretty comprehensive. However, it also doesn't have a YTD return column for stocks, which drives me crazy, and they only update the portfolio return and benchamarks once a month, and even that is on a lag of several days. So I can't accurately compare that account's returns against the etrade and schwab account.