Intuit Launches Brokerage Service
Quicken Brokerage goes online, offering familiar tools that fit well with other programs (for a price).Mike Hogan, special to PCWorld.com
Intuit launches a new Web-based brokerage service this week within its omnibus financial Web site Quicken.com, with tight links to both its Quicken money manager and TurboTax software.
A joint venture with Siebert Financial, Quicken Brokerage offers the usual complement of brokerage services to anyone who signs up. But customers who also use Quicken get unusually easy access to financial data, as well as highly individual tax and investment planning.
Pricing depends on the volume of trades, and Quicken Brokerage imposes a number of flat fees for common services--making it higher than some of its rivals. But Intuit argues that its money-management functions will pay off.
Identify Cost, Effect
Quicken Brokerage's most noteworthy feature easily shows you how a proposed trade might affect your tax liability for the coming year. The remarkably robust order preview window shows pretax and after-tax totals, along with other useful tax-related details such as cost basis. It also conveniently displays information such as real-time quotes and commission amount (a surprisingly rare disclosure in most broker programs).
In addition, Quicken Brokerage shows how much you'd save by waiting to sell an investment until it becomes a "long term" holding. Other tax planning tools are also bundled.
Owners of Quicken 2003 Deluxe or Premier can execute trades from within those programs and receive a wide array of alerts that might prompt action. However, any Quicken user who stores data on the Quicken.com Web site can tap most Quicken Brokerage features even when the user is away from the PC on which Quicken is installed. That includes access from telephones, wireless PDAs, or Web-enabled cell phones.
Another handy Quicken Brokerage feature is its capability to assemble multiple accounts under a single interface. Financial experts note that the typical investor--despite owning accounts that have dwindled in the past three years--still has multiple accounts at several financial Web sites, each with its own commands for common brokerage functions. But with this new service, you could download your data from thousands of different sites into Quicken and then access it all through the very similar interface of Quicken Brokerage, which sports many familiar Quicken analytical tools. The feature lets you see the status of all your holdings in one place just when you are trying to make a buy or sell decision.
Cozy With Quicken.com
Other tax and planning tools on Quicken Brokerage will be familiar to users of Quicken and TurboTax. You can accurately track your ongoing capital gains and losses for your entire portfolio, with an eye toward your after-tax returns. Quicken Brokerage's strength is that it can make calculations based on your actual tax and income without relying on frequent, often mistake-prone data entry from you.
Naturally, all brokerage records flow easily into Quicken or TurboTax--less common among non-Quicken sites, though thousands now claim "compatibility" with the money manager.
If you like Quicken's portfolio manager (among the most complete and flexible we've encountered in 15 years of reviews), you'll be let down by Quicken.com's less elegant approach. However, it provides a half dozen spreadsheet-like views, each offering more than 50 different data columns for your holdings, which is still far more functional than other sites.
Quicken Brokerage automatically sets alerts for earnings announcements and other news, and it captures a large amount of relevant news stories and brokerage reports. You can customize all of that automation, too. Also provided are useful stock and mutual fund screening tools. We've learned that analyst reports--and even some 10K information--can be bogus, but with Quicken.com's tools you can analyze your current asset allocation and evaluate new ways to try to enhance your return.
Pay to Play
Quicken Brokerage's features might be appealing to you, but Intuit's claimed "discount brokerage" prices may prompt you to do a double take. Quicken Brokerage doesn't carry the discounting typical of a new market entrant.
Intuit puts itself at the head of the class with pricing comparable to that of competitors E-Trade, Fidelity, and Schwab--all brokerage pioneers who are selective about their customers.
Quicken's online standard market order commission is $25 for lots up to 1000 shares if the trade is executed online, $40 over touch-tone phone or wireless device, and $50 if you talk to a broker (with the usual additional pennies for each share over that). Those rates are each $8 cheaper than those of Fidelity and Schwab, but a couple bucks more than E-Trade's.
By comparison, TD Waterhouse--a true discount brokerage (but not the cheapest)--charges $5 to $7 less than Quicken Brokerage regardless of how you trade. Ameritrade fees are $17 to $32 lower.
Also, Quicken Brokerage charges rather high fees. Among them are a $35 annual maintenance fee on retirement accounts and a $20 quarterly fee on any account with a balance below $10,000 without a certain level of trading. Quicken Brokerage imposes extra fees for actions like converting IRAs, and it charges a $75 account termination fee.
TD Waterhouse and Ameritrade don't charge retirement account service fees, and their account balance minimum is $2000. No doubt Quicken charges less for some of the dozens of other broker services it offers, but its prices are typically high.
Quicken Brokerage could be a huge time-saver and might even guide you to do better in the market--but only if you're an active user of Quicken, preferably Quicken 2003 for optimum compatibility. For non-Quicken users who simply want to transact, it's not a bargain-basement option.