Hi,

I know there have been some questions about E-Trade's Global Trading platform and I just wanted to throw out that today I performed my first trade on it. I purchased a canadian stock, commission was $19.99 and I was able to see the real time quotes and there was no problem in execution.

Here are the commissions per country. I'm not sure if the info has been shared already.

Canada CAD 19.99
France EUR 15.84
Germany EUR 15.84
Hong Kong HKD 155.00
Japan JPY 2,385.00
United Kingdom GBP 8.95

All countries have real time quotes except for Hong Kong. One annoyance that I did run into was I had to buy my stock in blocks of 100. (Unlike Scottrade where I can buy any amount of shares over the phone.) I'm waiting for answer from them on what cause a stock to be needed to be bought in blocks of 100 (e.g. is it market cap, stock price, or something else). I will let you know when I find out.

The process of buying an international stock is the following. Convert your US$ into the currency of the stock and then you can go ahead and make your trade in that currency. So you are getting charged on both the currency conversion and trade. The currency conversion is more in your favor with the more cash you are converting.

Overall the trading platform seems to be alright and their customer service has been good. I invest in a fair amount of international stocks (canada in particular) so the move for me made sense. I will update if I run into issues along the way.