There's so little information about their brokerage, thank's for checking it out!tl;dr: I think the Smartly card will be great if you want to park > $5k in the Savings account to enable 2.5% cash back on a free card. If you want to push beyond that to the brokerage, buckle up.
I'm out. I'm going to take some of the $450 I got for the checking account bonus and use it to pay the $95 brokerage account closure fee and move on. I currently am setup with BoA/ML, so when I saw this I thought "The checking/credit card interface seems better than BoA, so the brokerage interface can't be worse than ML." Now I can safely say that as clunky as the ML user interface is, at least it's possible to handle all the functions you would need to self-manage an account.
Setting this up had lots of little snags along the way.
Want to establish PODs for the Checking/Savings account? Oh, you have to call and give the information over the phone, from there they print out a form and mail it to you, and then you have to sign it and mail it back in. Alternatively you can visit a branch and do this paperwork with a banker. These are your only 2 choices.
With US Bancorp Investments it’s pretty clear that they are geared to have this all go through human advisors. You can do self-directed, but most actions require downloading a PDF, filling it out, and then either emailing or USPS mailing the form back. There is no online submission portal to securely send these documents.
Want to apply for margin? Fill out the usual investor profile form (with your SSN) in PDF form and mail/email it back in. A fun part of the form is you have to specify your estimated marginal tax bracket, and the form hasn't even been updated with the 2018 tax bracket changes. When this is processed there is no notice. If approved margin will just show up on the “balances” section of your account.
Want to transfer assets? Again, fill out a PDF and send it back, hope someone gets it and does something with it, and also hope that they don’t mess up entering the transfer request back into a computer on their side.
I started a test transfer to seed the account on 9/25, the shares I selected to move from Merrill disappeared out of my account there on Monday (10/7) and Merrill is the only entity that ever sent me any notification about any activity. Those shares just showed up in my account at USBI last night(10/9), and I only know this because I've been logging in multiple times each day to check the status. There's no way to see any kind of transfer progress online, and when I called they had to relay my request to some back-end team who was supposed to call me back with a status of my transfer. Even now that the transfer is fully complete there's been no notifications despite having every single notification option enabled on my US Bank profile for this account.
So far with the self-directed brokerage interface it appears there's no way to setup dividend reinvestment, no way to chose a preferred disposal method, and so far it appears it's not even possible to sell specific tax lots.
I've got a few questions if you don't mind to investigate:Does US Bank block ETFs, like $NTSX, $AVGE, and $RSSB?
Does US Bank have a decent low-ER No Transaction Fee/No Load mutual fund list, or are they like Merrill Edge where they all have high ER?
What kind of Money Market Funds are available at US Bank? Do they match Merrill Edge's access to Institutional Money Market Funds for only $1?
Statistics: Posted by isira — Thu Oct 10, 2024 11:02 pm — Replies 188 — Views 21217