Firstrade Securities, Inc. Review

The only person that give 5 star must be only the owner and founder. Everyone else including their incompetent stuffs don't like the company.

Poor customer service. Email response is always slow or even ignored. I asked a question about withdrawal with international wire but I got no response. Being unable to withdraw fund is the most serious issue for investors but they don't care about it at all. If the firm does not concern about the fund withdrawal seriously, no commission or no account fee is meaningless to customer. No confidence in putting money there!

The most incompetent broker you will ever do business with. Everytime I have to speak with customer service, I end the conversation in disbelief that I have trusted these people with custodianship of my money. And yet, I'm still a customer, because of the low fees, and because I hope and pray everytime that I can just trade on the automated system and not have to interact with anyone who works here. Seriously, if you don't want to deal with constant glitches, poor trade execution, and totally clueless customer service representatives, save yourself and go elsewhere.

Their customer service is REAL great. I've never encountered with such patient and nice customer service before, especially in financial field. Also their platform is good to use, easy operation, easy trade.

Open an account online, the service is very slow, I estimate it took two weeks to complete before and after several phone calls.Customer service is not positive as if you do not open an account.As you please.

Friendly customer service with Bilingual speakers in English, Chinese, and Cantonese. The platform is trustworthy and competitive with zero commission and mobile trading.

Beware they ask for all this paperwork so that they can forge your paper work. The customer service is running a scam against people... beware the custo.er service are scammers looking for a picture of your paper work.

No one answered the phone for 2 days. My account was locked! ! I ca n t reach it by any means.

Overall a terrible experience with Firstrade. Find their procedures and customer service archaic. Their website is very difficult to navigate and is not intuitive. The website itself looks like it s not been updated since the late 90s. Opened An Account Based On Low Trading Costs But Clear You Get What You Pay For. Main issues:

- Booked 3 trades that were rejected because the fund was not opened to new investors. NO EMAIL NOTIFICATION ADVISING OF TRADE REJECTION. There was nothing on the site preventing trading with all trades appearing to have been placed. it is reasonable to expected email notification of trade rejection but were obliged to go onto the site to see why the trades were rejected. Calling customer servicers were told log into the site to confirm trades have been successfully placed

- Did not act on instruction to withdraw cash from our Firstrade account back to our external funding account. Instead DELAYED REPAYMENT wanting us to inform if there are any issues we experienced relating to their trading platform.

- Wanted to change our external funding account to a joint account but were told we could not do thins until we had out account open for 3 months

Have to wait forever on the call and they never answer calls...Very disappointing...

I have used Firstrade for 15 yrs. Got a big surprise today. They charge me $75 for moving to another company, $55 for moving part of retirement account. Otherwise, they would hijack $500 of my money from my Firstrade account. WHAT?!

Never signed a contract showing these high fees before. Could not even find some of them online.

I withdrew before without so much fee.

Customer service lied and said every company charges these fees. Vanguard and TIAA-CREF do not.

Very disappointed. Very bad business practices. Stay away from Firstrade!

SCAM ARTISTS - I signed up for an account, made a few referrals, went to make a deposit and made a few referrals within a few days, and they disabled my account. Calling gets you an hour worth of "hold music", having them answer then hang up, or getting voicemail after waiting on hold for an hour. Waste your time, and STILL end up with a disabled account.

Customer Service seems helpful but back office is terrible. There is a 30 business day hold periods to take out funds even when the funds were wired-in for new accounts. Extra identification documents not specified originally are asked for every request.They will also ask you to explain if you wired-in funds from bank account A and get it transferred to bank account B (in your ACH profile).If that was the case, you shouldn't accept transfers in from bank accounts not in in ACH profile.Why take the money gleefully and then ask for explanation when customer wants to withdraw? Almost seems that they think every customer is a criminal or money launderer.
I don't want to entrust them with my money as I am sure they will create even more "rules and regulations" to prevent me from withdrawing my own funds.
UPDATE 2/11/2019
They quietly charged me 5.00 as paper statement fee for an account which they confirmed they had closed. I had to call to get it refunded.I honestly don't even know in which part of the application i was given a choice of paper vs electronic statement. I just want to close all my accounts with them but I am not even sure whether they closed my account even though their customer service says account has been closed.