Signing up for Firstrade / Trading Plan Update

So, I've signed up for the Firstrade individual trading account yesterday. It will a few days before I can do any trading since it takes about 5 days for ACH bank transfer to complete. I think it's a good idea sign up for an account sooner rather than later if you're expecting to make trades in the near future even if not necessarily today or tomorrow because it does take a while for account to become active. Also, if you choose to go with the Firstrade, and sign up before the end of 2007, you will get 100 free trades. That is only $695 worth of trades ($6.95/trade x 100). If it wasn't for the promotion, I was strongly considering signing up with Tradeking which has $4.95 trades.

I have not explored the account options in detail yet, but I was pretty happy to see the S&P stock and fund reports and various market commentaries/analysis. Those additional research sources will work well in conjunction with the Morningstar analyst reports.

Once the account is set up, I will check S&P reports on my top picks so far and if I find any interesting and/or significant points, I will post them here.

So far, I have not been punished for my delay in buying the top picks. Most of those picks lost a few percentage points in price and only Medtronic and Coach are making an effort to upset me a little by their gain of 6-8%. I'm not worried about those two too much though: if you look at it short-term, there is a good chance that they'll go down again and I'll buy them at same low price that I analyzed them at; or, if you look at it long-term, they're still a large upside to both of them, so there is still plenty of gains to be made.