Online Broker Review

Updated Saturday, May 7, 2011

Account Opening Grade: C

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Overview:

The account opening process at Just2Trade needs some improvement. To request electronic funds transfer access, we had to enter our information twice and then mail / fax a form with a voided check. Also, we were confused by the identity verification questions and, because of this, we were required to mail / fax a copy of a government issued ID. In general, we would prefer an entirely paperless account opening process. Getting initial approval for our account was fast but with funds transfer time taken into account, it took about two weeks from the start of the process to gaining full trading access.

Details:

To start the account opening process, select the Apply Now button from the Just2Trade home page (click on images for larger views):

We selected to open an individual investment account. Other account types available include Just Tenants With Rights of Survivorship, Joint Tenants in Common, Traditional / Roth / Rollover IRAs and corporate, partnership and other business entities.

Just2Trade requires clients to maintain a $2,500 account balance. They also require 2+ years of trading experience, though we don't think they verify this besides asking for trading experience as part of the account opening questions.

Just2Trade is currently not available for investors residing in New Hampshire, North Dakota and Canada. According to Just2Trade, there are also minimum recommended system requirements, which includes a modern PC or MAC, a newer version of Java and one of the later versions of either Internet Explorer, Firefox or Netscape. We doubt the validity of these requirements, however, since Just2Trade worked fine for us in browsers such as Chrome and Safari.

Across three pages of forms we answered basic background questions, selected to open a margin account with options trading rights, chose a default money market fund and electronically signed two disclosure forms. After that, we were prompted to disclose our trading experience:

We next selected to fund our account by electronically linking our checking account to our Just2Trade account and so we entered our checking account details. Finally, we were asked to answer a series of identity verification questions. Some of the questions were quite difficult and we were actually not sure if we answered them correctly. Once we answered the questions, there was no menu choice to submit our answers, which was quite confusing. We decided to refresh the page. We were next prompted with a message notifying us that the account opening process was complete, we would receive confirmation of this in the next 36 - 48 hours and that we needed to print and mail / fax the electronic funds transfer form (ACH) to Just2Trade:

We were annoyed at this last part because we had already filled out the ACH form as part of the account opening process but we were forced to fill out the whole form again anyway. Soon after, we attached a voided check to the form and faxed everything to Just2Trade.

We next received an automated email thanking us for submitting an account application. Later on that day, we received an email requesting us to mail / fax a copy of a government issued ID. We suppose this was required because we did not answer all of the identity verification questions correctly, but this is pure speculation.

The next day, we received separate emails with our login information and options approval notice. Two days after that we were notified that our ACH request had been processed but it would not be active for an additional week. This seems to be a required delay in the process so keep this in mind if you wish to fund your account using this method. Once we gained access and requested a fund transfer, the money arrived in our account two business days later and was instantly available for trading.

The total account opening and funding time took two weeks.

Just2Trade Account Opening