Update: As of March 2009, the minimum balance was raised to $25,000 to get 10 free trades a month.

So, a little over a year and a half ago, I decided I wanted to give the stock market a try for myself.  I wanted a site that had a low trading costs and a low minimum balance.  Enter Zecco.com.

Zecco, which stands for “Zero Commission Cost“, is an online trading community that, like its name implies, offers commission free trades.  There are, however, a few guidelines…

 

1. Account minimum of $2,500
2. 10 free trades a month

Accounts that do not meet these guidelines or for every trade after your first 10 are $4.50 a trade which is still lower than most sites that I am aware of.

Everything wasn’t perfect; I did have a few problems with Zecco.  One major setbacks for me was that the site required a signed, written document to change contact information. They may have updated this since, but this became a big hassle for me when I needed to change my mailing address on my account. I sent in the signed document and the customer service rep who received the request actually updated the account to the wrong address. This was mostly my fault because I hand-wrote the address and I have horrible handwriting.

Other than that and a few other minor mishaps, my experience with Zecco has been excellent.  The site seems like it was built to teach and inform the beginning investor.  The forum is very active and full of members willing to share their knowledge of investing and give there opinions on companies.  The community side of Zecco also allows, but does not obligate, users to share their portfolios and daily trades.

I would highly recommend Zecco to anyone who wants to give the stock market a try for themselves.  Zecco would also be a descent place to start a traditional or Roth IRA. The Roth IRA accounts have a yearly $30 maintenance and mutual funds are $10 per trade for each account; so, I would recommend a portfolio of diversified stocks or ETFs since those can be purchased at no commission.

**Send me an email to aheuermann ‘at’ gmail.com if you would like a referral

Unlike the traditional Model-View-Controller frameworks, where controllers handle requests and populate data to pass to the view, Wicket organizes things in components which are more stateful, and resemble widgets in the Java Swing Toolkit. Input fields, links, images, ect… are considered components.

Each component is backed by its own model. Each model is a POJO that implements serializable. The model keeps state through requests by storing itself in memory. This can be the cause of the main problem that a lot of developers have with Wicket. The storing of models in memory during requests can be very memory intensive especially with larger applications with many components. To take care of this problem, Wicket components can also be detachable, allowing them to handle their own storage and reinstatement with every request freeing up resources.

Each Application has a main class that extends the WebApplication class. This class defines the homepage and allows for all configuration of the application. An application can consist of several classes that extend the Page or WebPage classes depending on what content type will be sent as a response to the request.

There are several things that Wicket does that make it easy to learn and stand out compared to other Java web application frameworks.

Separation of Presentation and Application Logic

Its front end is comprised solely of standard HTML pages with simple XHTML compliant markup. This gives the developer the freedom to design the presentation of each page with any WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

Easy Debugging

Since all application logic is in Java code, the developer can debug the application using any Java IDE that supports debugging. It can be a mess to debug Java code in views and it can be hard to pick out exceptions that are thrown from views in some applications. Since all logic is in actual Java classes with the Wicket applications, they can be easier to debug at times.

No confusing configuration files

Wicket tries to stay away from xml configuration files that can get very confusing for developers especially beginners. Wicket tries to be all about simplicity. There are no configuration files to learn with Wicket.

Re-usability

Wicket components are designed to be extended. A component can be a search form which can be comprised of a text field and a search button. Components like this can be easily reused throughout the application and added to various pages or panels.

Since a component is a Java class, the reuse of the component can be a lot easier than if it were a piece of html with application logic in another Java class. Whenever, the component needs to do something out of its ordinary function, it can be extended. This can be easier to maintain compared to other methods which may require special code added to the reused piece or even making a copy and modifying it.

State Management

With Wicket, it is unnecessary to store state in an HttpSession object or something similar. Wicket automatically manages server-side state by associating it with components.

Getting Started

I found a tutorial video here. It is pretty easy to install, maven does almost everything for you but add the M2_REPO location variable in eclipse. From there setting up the demo applications were very straight forward.

Sites that Use Wicket

There is a list of sites here. The only one that I recognized was eventful.com.

Conclusion

Wicket seems to be a friendly Java web development framework compared to most. It is an interesting approach to web development. It is a trade off between system and development costs. Since it can be very system intensive for larger applications, it may require systems that have more resources; however, the time spent developing the application in Wicket can be considerably less compared to other frameworks. This is sometimes a good trade off for companies where development costs are very expensive compared to resource and server costs which are relatively cheap. I think someone with decent Java and web development experience could pick up this framework without much hassle and produce applications in a quick time frame.

Sources

http://wicket.apache.org/

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=IntroducingApacheWicket

http://ensode.net/wicket_first_look.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicket_framework

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t60786.html

Anyway, to the point of this post. I came across this video today. It’s of Ron Paul speaking out to congress before the war in Iraq.

Besides Paul, Gravel, Kucinich, and Obama were the only other current presidential candidates that opposed the war in Iraq. It is this type of foresight that we need in the oval office instead of some flip-flopping opportunist.

Ron Paul has stood by his beliefs since day one, and this one in particular would have saved each American $4,000 and counting.

Ron Paul most of all, wants to get the government out of our lives. A large part of this is getting the government out of our pockets; he wants to get rid of the income tax fully by reducing government spending dramatically. A big chunk is getting rid of most government sponsored agencies.

Government Spending

The main problem though is overall government spending. Our country is now over 9 trillion dollars in debt. Here is how we match up to others as far as external debt. Like his father and Reagan before him, Bush has greatly increased our national debt mainly because of the War in Iraq. Ron Paul pledges to always keep a balanced budget and start chipping away at the debt.

Social Security

If it is known that people my age are never going to see Social Security Benefits, why are we still paying into it? Most people I have talked to respond saying, something about all the people who are dependent on it, but when we take care of those, who is going to take care of us for all the contributions we have made? In my opinion by continuing the program we are just transferring the end of Social Security to my generation, where we will absorb the loses. This doesn’t make much sense to me since none of us were even around when it became law.

Ron Paul plans to make contributions to Social Security optional. This gives those of us to put this savings to other forms of retirement savings which we will be guaranteed come retirement age and not have to sacrifice tens of thousands of dollars paying for someone elses.

Conclusion

What I like the most about Ron Paul is that there are no lobbyists speaking through him. Ron Paul’s contributers are average people giving a few dollars here and there because they believe in his message.

Yodlee categorizes your transactions and gives you a chance to set up and manage a monthly budget for each category. You can also set up email alerts for accounts reaching a minimum balance, a CD maturing, large withdraws/deposits from/to an account, and many other forms of notifications. There is a net-worth tracker, which tells you the overall worth of all your assets minus any liabilities. Monthly records are kept so you can see how your wealth is changing over time.

Most of you are probably a little hesitant to add all your accounts in a single application, but let me ensure you that Yodlee has a strong focus on security. A few months back they also added multi-factor authentication.

I have been using Yodlee for about a two years now. There are a couple of other sites that offer a similar service, but in my opinion don’t stack up.

• Wesabe.com provides recommendations for saving money based on what you have spent money on.

• Mint.com provides account rate recommendations and shows you how much you can save if you switched.

Both of these sites have really good ideas, but I still use Yodlee. They don’t seem to have as wide a variety of services or support as many accounts.

Yodlee is free; you can register for an account here.