Well, it’s official now. Because I live in Canada I am not allowed to open a Zecco Trading brokerage account. I am being told it’s something to do with stock market regulations between the two countries. After several emails back and forth this is the final (and by this time slightly annoyed) response I received:

“Thank you for contacting Zecco Trading. If you are a Canadian Citizen living in Canada you cannot open a Trading account with us. If you are a U.S. citizen living in Canada you cannot open a Trading account with us. If you are a Canadian Citizen living in the U.S. you can open a Trading account with us. If you are a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. you can open a Trading account with us. Zecco is located in Ontario, California (United States). You may have a mailing address in Canada however you cannot have a residence address in Canada.”

I am not a Canadian citizen, but my current residence is and for the foreseeable future will be in Canada so Zecco is definitely a no-go. Will have to find something else now…

Over the last month or so I have become interested in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). After having read an article in Canadian Business about them I looked into what’s available, picked out a few in an area I thought has great potential (_emerging markets_), created a Google Finance portfolio with a dummy $5000 investment in each and sat back to watch them. Knowing how our only other stock - Symantec - performs (or rather NOT) I wasn’t expecting much. But after about a month the ETFs have risen in value (on average across 5 ETFs) by 8.1%! Looking at Nasdaq’s and DOW’s performance over the same period this is almost 3% higher than the market.

Now I know past performance is no indicator for the future but being how I am this got me very excited and I decided to put some real money into these ETFs. Since I won’t be investing big I was looking for the cheapest online broker I could find and Aggie pointed me to Zecco.

Reading others’ experiences with Zecco a couple of things stand out:

1. Zecco interface sucks.
2. Trades are FREE (up to 10 per month)

Being a newbie trader, #2 is more important to me than #1, so I decided to give it a go regardless of the complaints about site usability. I can deal with it!

Well, not quite.

After spending about 30 minutes trying to create an account with Zecco I got stuck on the personal information section. It requires you to supply your country of residence and your state. I am currently living in Canada but the states available are US States only. You cannot get past this step as the mandatory validation lets you know that you have an “Invalid State/Country combination.”. AARGHH. Being a software developer myself I know this is such an easy error to find and fix and it frustrates me to see such basic usability issues anywhere. On the other hand maybe they didn’t test at all or they don’t want any Canadians applying - but I’m not Canadian!

I digress. I’ve sent them an email last night about the issue and am waiting for a response. My trading will have to wait. For now.

(Meanwhile, US Stocks - including my ETFs - are plunging today after the Federal Reserve Bank cut interest rates - so maybe the hold-up was a good thing