Scottrade Expands With Free Seminars, New Branches

Interestingly, the financial industry and investment firms were very strong in their ad dollar spending in June. As ClickZ reports, referring to the data provided by TNS media Intelligence, the first six positions of top 50 internet advertisers by media value in June 2009 are dominated by the financial industry's investment firms.

Scottrade online spent 40,643,100 dollars in June leading the list. Second comes TD Ameritrade Brokerage with 27,899,700 dollar advertising of its consumer services. E-Trade Financial comes fourth with 17,701,600 dollar advertising of its online services, while the company spent another 17,205,200 dollars in June for its consumer services, occupying the 5th place. The sixth is again Scottrade Stock Brokerage, which spent 17,821,7 dollars on its consumer services.

The strategy of Scottrade's expansion beside offering discounted prices and nationwide branch expansion of online brokerage services also includes free seminars. The next seminar the brokerage firm will offer for the Boston investors at the end of August.

"During the free workshop, Scottrade customers can network with other investors, learn how to easily manage their accounts, and effectively use the online investing functions and features of Scottrade’s trading platforms. Topics will include finding opportunities with stock and exchange-traded fund screeners; placing pre-market and after-hours online trades; learning the economic calendar for IPOs, earnings and splits; and setting up alerts for account-specific updates," writes the company in its latest release.

The company hopes to show its current customers and potential investors "the new tools and services Scottrade has added" so that the investors can make better–informed investment decisions. On July 29, the company launched its Free Online Education Center, which aims to educate investors on how to calculate price/earnings ratio, selet an IRA type and estimate savings for retirement or sending a child to college among other topics.

When about eight years ago I started with Sctotrade, the company did not have any offices in my town. Now the company has one even in our little town and around eleven offices in North Carolina.

Recent months have been remarkable for the online investment brokerage firms such as Scotttrade. The year-to-date rise of the Stock Market and new hopes of the U.S. economic recovery has helped the entire financial industry to improve its bottom line. However, observers also warn that some of this success should be also attributed to government's one time incentive programs. Will the industry be able to sustain its growth in the future without the government's incentive programs and stimulus remains to be seen.

Written by Armen Hareyan