Okay, semi- investing noob question here...

I've got an investment account with Smith Barney, about 30 g's. It's with the same advisor my father has used for years, I'm not real happy with it though. (Too high commissions, not great service since i'm one of his "smaller" accounts)

I'm thinking about selling a couple of the stocks completely, and possibly keeping one or two. If I wanted to switch to an online brokerage, is it a big deal to transfer a stock from my Smith Barney account to say Schwab or whoever?

I'd like to get some other opinions before I speak to my advisor.

Thanks in advance

 

I'm not sure if you can do a direct transfer. But I do know that you can request a stock certificate from your broker and then send the certificate to a discount broker. Your full service broker may charge you for the certificate

What you don't want to do is sell the stock and then repurchase. If you do that you will have a nice tax bill.

 

exactly, plus i refuse to give this guy another commission on the sale. thanks for the advise, i'll see his recomendations and prices.

 

I am finishing up some consulting work at Mellon, a stock transfer agency. Read this: http://www.colonialstock.com/html/shareholders.html to understand the concept of stock transfer. It talks a bit about transferring ownership from one person to another, but the concept also applies when transferring from one broker to another.

Then decide who you want to use as a broker and contact them in regard to their stock transfer process. Keep in mind that not all stocks are issued in the form of certificates. In fact, very few are these days (administrative nightmare).

 

Once you have settled on a new broker, give him the information for your present account. He can pull your holdings over from the other broker with no problem and there should be little or no charge to you.

 

Thanks for the info everyone!

I guess the first step is deciding on the new broker, than checking out what they can do for me as far as the transfer.

nsxnext...thanks for the good read!

 

No problem. Finally get to use something I learned during my consulting engagements for good rather than evil.