@5KRunner wrote:
@Aim_High wrote:Thanks @5KRunner. That e*Trade account was one I considered in my opening comments since it's a very competitive rate and from a wll-known financial institution. What are your impressions with it so far? Keep us updated in the thread when you get a chance.
Sure thing! I opened the account late last Thursday, 8/25, and used my Alliant HYSA as a funding source. E*Trade initiated the transfer immediately, without waiting for verification via Plaid or micro-transaction, which I found strange.
I received a notification from Alliant on Friday regarding the transfer, though I'm not sure which side to credit for the speed at which the transaction was processed.
On Saturday, I attempted to add an additional transfer account on the E*Trade website to enable transfers to my primary financial institution (BoA). Unfortunately, they allow the addition of only one transfer account for the first 60 days after account opening.
Funds are still not available, though that's not surprising, as this is only the 2nd business day since the account was opened.
Their mobile app and website are both easy to navigate, though quite bare-bones compared to Merrill (my primary brokerage account, as I'm planning to climb the Preferred Rewards ladder at BoA) or Schwab (my secondary brokerage account, where the majority of my holdings are in SWVXX).
And finally, here's why I chose E*Trade over some of the other FIs offering higher yields: they're backed by Morgan Stanley, which is the 6th-largest bank in the country in terms of assets and 4th-largest by market cap, and they're among the banks considered systemically important to the US and world economies. In other words, they're big, reliable and likely to be around for a while.
Thanks for that feedback, @5KRunner, and I'm thinking more-and-more that they are worth a look.
The underlined paragraph is exactly one reason I mentioned e*Trade as one option under consideration in my opening remarks. The larger banks tend to be more stable, spend more on customer service, have better technology, and seem to offer more consumer-friendly policies for funding accounts or moving assets later on. That's why I've tended to focus on the major lenders and was skeptical of rate-chasing with some of these smaller, lesser-known banks that have set up virtual online branches to compete in the money market savings area.
Just as an aside, there's a lot of ways to rank the relative size of banks, and by assets is a good marker. I found it interesting, though, that you quoted a much larger size for Morgan Stanley than I expected. I've usually gone by >this list< which (as-of April 2021 metrics) listed Morgan Stanley as the 17th largest US bank by assets and links the source to the FDIC. That list was also >mirrored< on the popular financial website, Bankrate.com. Still very large, but not sixth. However, I found a list that mirrors your reference to size >on Wikipedia< with data as-of 09/30/2021. That list puts Morgan Stanley at 6th, but I noticed the source data was not listed as the FDIC directly. Instead it was the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) which is the parent government interagency body over the the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). So now I'm wondering why the discrepancy in size variations beyond the slight difference in dates, which could have a mostly minor effect from quarter-to-quarter. Both lists are supposedly by asset size. This is a little bit of repetition from the recent thread, What is a Major Bank? Just for consistency, I'll link this paragraph back to that thread for further discussion if anyone would like to digress on that off-topic diversion.
