Best Brokerage Bonuses – Earn Up To $3,500

Guys, the Merrill Edge “Read Our Full Post” link directs to the Chase You Invest page.

For more active traders, LightspeedTrader offers up to $10,000 back in commission rebates. Can’t beat that. https://www.lightspeed.com/10k-2019/

The Ally bonus is at https://www.ally.com/go/invest/promotion.html

The ally link up there is bad, see Mark’s suggestion below instead.

One thing to keep in mind are the fees when you want to close or transfer out via the ACAT system, which is thee direct broker to broker transfer system. Some brokerages charge for partial transfers, most charge for full transfers.

For example, Ameritrade does not charge for partial transfers out, but if your balance is under $100,000 and you close the account they charge $75. If your balance was over 100,000 they will not charge you to close and transfer. For regular brokerages, you can withdraw the cash with no fee since its not an ACAT, but for IRA’s its best to do an ACAT to move to another brokerage. If you do a withdrawal in a ira, there may be tax implications.

Ally charges for a partial or full transfer out acat fee of $50. Something to keep in mind when when movement of funds may come with a cost.

William: You may want to add that DP on offers

‘Read our full post’ link for Merrill Edge goes to the wrong page

William Charles For personal capital, the current bonus likely varies with how much the referrer has invested with personal capital. So stating that the “current referral bonus is $20” is not accurate in two ways. The bonus paid by Personal Capital is an Amazon gift card, and the current bonus for my referrals is showing as $50 Amazon GC. Based on my experience with the last $100 promo, I doubt they will do $100 again. It seemed to be the tipping point for people and they were awash in new accounts who only signed up for the bonus. Also, there is a new paragraph in the T&Cs, as follows:

The referrer can share their referral link only with people they know. Referrers agree that they will not: (1) make it available to the general public (such as posting it on a coupon website, bonus website, job website, Craigslist, Reddit, and other sites at the discretion of Personal Capital); (2) Use paid social media, paid search, or any paid advertising to distribute the referral link; (3) Try to send to any deals email distribution lists, coupon/bonus email distribution lists, or rewards email distribution lists; and (4) Use automated systems, bots, or programmed scripts to distribute, post, or share their referral link.

During the $100 promo, my broker asked whether I used facebook to send out my referral link, and I said no. I am not sure whether facebook or twitter would be precluded by the above term. I guess I need new friends and neighbors now. 🙂

Not technically a brokerage bonus, but there’s a good IRA bonus that was covered on DoC in 2015. https://www.doctorofcredit.com/navy-federal-credit-union-100-ira-bonus/

NFCU, 100 bonus on 100 deposited. Hold date not specified, fees for closing brokerage not specified. Soft pull to join NFCU.

https://www.navyfederal.org/savings-season-2019/save-money.php?cmpid=em%7Ccdira%7Cira%7Cirabonus%7C04/16/2019%7C36201%7C%7Ccb1.3

Youinvest or Merrill seem like the best offers to me. Youinvest because of the 90 day thing + the fact that unlike the other brokerages, if you keep some money with Chase (at least 15K, 75K is even better), you get free trades. And I think they also offer free mutual fund trades regardless of how much is in the account. The one con is that their brokerage platform is pretty much no-frills. Actually there is a second con as well … most people would be much better off doing the Chase Sapphire bonus at $750 (or 600 pts) instead. And then use YouInvest with the 75K requirement and get some interest using money markets. But it’s one or the other, not both.

And if anyone out there prefers mutual funds over ETFs, read the fine print for other brokerages. Quite often they state cheap or free trades (usually only for 1-3 months), but that’s for stocks/etfs only; they charge $20 for mutual fund trades.

Merrill can be decent so long as a BOA credit card is linked to preferred rewards. There are various tiers, but at 100K it adds .75% to the bonus amounts. So instead of 3% in certain categories, it becomes 5.25%. And the 2% warehouse club bonus turns into 3.5% That is actually more worthwhile than the bonus… although it’s not bad to get some extra free money as well. Downside with Merrill is that many mutual fund trades cost $20 but at least ETFs should be free at the higher tier levels.

Have accounts with Etrade, Ameritrade, Schwab, etc,etc
Any sign up bonus with interactive brokers? Please get a deal for us DoC. Need incentives to move.

Love this, please post more in the future! Especially those on the lower requirement end (like under $5k)

Here’s $100 from Schwab. You used to be able to self refer but you now need a code, of course there are tons of them floating around blogs and social media. The referer gets nothing, only the new customer. https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/refer-prospect.html

For folks looking for more of these, here’s one from PNC. https://www.pnc.com/en/personal-banking/investments-and-retirement/campaigns/investments-offer.html Not sure how good they are or what kinds of fees they have.

Not at all understanding why you list the Chase YouInvest bonus, but not the Chase Preferred Client bonus. With the latter, you get almost 3x the bonus as the former, for the basically the same commitment, assuming transfer of existing stock holdings.

William Charles Could you list the deposit level where bonuses start as well in this quick summary page since that fast weeds out eligibility for some of us? Currently the bonuses start with $25k deposit for Chase & E*Trade, $10k current TDA customers, $50k new customers, $20k Merrill.