I got an e-mail today from ShareBuilder. Awhile back I had opened a number of accounts to take advantage of some free-money deals, but they each required purchasing a stock. Since ShareBuilder's real-time trade fees are relatively high compared to some other brokers, I have simply left my purchases where they were, earning small dividends appreciating – and then depreciating. (Yes, the stocks are actually worth less now, even with reinvested dividends, than they were when I bought them – good thing I bought them with free money.)

Anyway, I don't particularly like ShareBuilder. It's fine, I guess, for its stated purpose, but I like to have a little more control over when I make my trades. Plus, from a fee perspective there are simply better offers out there.

So, I almost hit delete without reading today's e-mail, but for some reason I decided to actually read it. I'm glad I did, because I found this little gem of a sentence among a bunch of other meaningless ones:

As a sign of thanks, we are providing you two, free real-time trade credits to use between now and January 2009.

This is great news, since the only way to sell a position at ShareBuilder is to do a real-time trade. Previously, selling simply didn't make sense for me, given the small amounts that I had in my accounts. Now, though, I can sell and transfer the money to my Zecco account, where it truly belongs.

Oh, and for the record, don't bother closing ShareBuilder accounts. They stay open forever without penalty, but there's like a $50 fee to close the account. Ridiculous.