Update 2/1/24: extended to 2/13/2024
Offer valid for new Firstrade Brokerage accounts opened from 1/3/2024 to 2/13/2024
Update 1/8/24: Deal is back, valid until 2/2/24 Highest tier is now $5k (was 4k). All other tiers the same. Hat tip to Dude
Update 5/17/23: Extended until 5/31/2023.
Update 11/11/22: Deal extended until Dec 12, 2022
The Offer
- Firstrade is offering up to $4,000 in cash when you open and fund a Firstrade Brokerage or IRA account by November 10th, 2022. Bonus you receive depends on the amount you deposit, tiers are as follows:
- $50 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $5,000+
- $100 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $10,000+
- $300 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $25,000+
- $700 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $100,000+
- $1,500 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $500,000+
- $3,000 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $1,000,000+
- $5,000 bonus when you deposit, transfer and/or roll over $1,500,000+
The Fine Print
-
Cash Bonus Offer valid for new Firstrade Brokerage or IRA accounts opened from 10/10/2022 to 11/10/2022 and funded within 30 days of account opening with $5,000 or more. To be eligible for the bonus, the new account must be opened using the specific “Open an Account” button associated with this promotional offer. Limit one offer per account type.
- This offer is open to U.S. residents only and excludes current and former Firstrade account holders who have closed their accounts within the past 90 days. This offer is not transferable.
- The account must remain open for 12 months with the minimum funding or assets required for participating in the offer (minus any trading losses), or Firstrade may charge the account for the cost of the offer at its sole discretion. Firstrade reserves the right to restrict or revoke this offer at any time.
Our Verdict
Funds need to stay in the account for 12 months, this isn’t as good as some of the other brokerage bonuses.
Hat tip to Xatos
I also definitely would not recommend Firstrade for a day to day brokerage – they are extremely ‘secure’ to the point of needless annoyance, don’t play well with aggregator software (such as Monarch Money), and as of late have very long wait times to respond to any kind of inquiry.
As far as ‘security’ is concerned, think receiving an email every time you login either yourself/manually or when an aggregator software connects to them. A couple weeks back my account was locked due to ‘suspicious login activity’ – My account hadn’t been compromised, I was just logging into it as always and also trying to troubleshoot the next point, aggregator software. To unlock the account I had to email a picture of my drivers license to Firstrade – when I did so it took over a week for them to review and unlock the account.
Onwards to aggregator software gripes: When I first signed up for a Firstrade account in February 2024 everything worked fine – I was actually happy that Firstrade was seemingly one of the only brokerages to offer a sane, modern 2FA login system with OTP codes – I could connect it to Monarch Money without issues, both my Non-IRA and IRA accounts were successfully linked and updated as expected. Beginning a month or two ago though Firstrade made some sort of update that broke connections using 3 major providers; Fincity, MX, and Plaid – now I can only link my non-IRA brokerage (IRA simply doesn’t appear for linking when logging in through an aggregator service) – on top of that I now have to manually reconnect the non-IRA account each time I want to update the balance in Monarch (this used to not be required and the balance would update on its own everyday) – again every time you do this login process you get an email informing you of it as a cherry on top.
In addition to taking more than a week to unlock my account after I submitted proof of my identity to them, I’ve also tried adding a beneficiary to the account recently – for IRA’s this process is easy and you can do it online (navigating to the feature is wonky but once you’re there it’s fine) – non-IRA’s don’t support online beneficiary designation though and so you have to fill out a paper form and scan+upload to Firstrade to have it processed. I submitted this document over 2 weeks ago and it’s still yet to be processed – the customer response times are very, very slow.
I’ve been with Firstrade for many years. I’m leaving and don’t recommend them. I made a wire transfer before noon yesterday and it has still not been credited to my account. I called and they took a few minutes to verify that it has been received, yet here I am 24 hours later and it is still not in my account. It’s supposed to be credited the same day.
Goodbye Firstrade.
anybody got their bonus yet? Its been more 30 days and I’ve asked customer service.
https://www.firstrade.com/accounts/promos
one year holding period, so not so great.
It’s worth noting that the IRA bonus is deposited into a taxable brokerage account (it’s in the terms). That’s the main reason I’m passing on this.
Offer valid for new Firstrade Brokerage accounts opened from 1/3/2024 to 2/13/2024
Thanks, updated.
Firstrade is very thorough about identity / risk procedures. Appreciated in some ways, but also it’s clear there’s a certain lack of sophistication because they fall back to manual human questioning of known information that is likely known to a bad actor.
After you do an ACATS in you have to do a phone verification to confirm information about your transfer. They also wanted to confirm control of phone number and required speaking on the phone tied to the account.
At least they have TOTP for login MFA, but they don’t use it to valid any other aspects of the account…
Got bonus in 5 biz days as terms state.
Any ACH withdrawal requires ID submission + bank statement to enable, pushes out of Firstrade. As I said above, they are thorough with any risk vector.
Most probably going to go for the $300 bonus since i have a free 27k in one of my brokerage accounts from Webull.
I just have this gut feeling the minute i do that, some other offer is going to come and knock it out the park and I’ll be left nodding my head for not waiting.
Such is life. You win some more than others.
I thought $500 for $10K at Tasty was amazing % wise. A year or two later they had $2K on $100K. Percent wise not as good, but still great and of course in absolute terms much more money. But lifetime exclusion.
I couldn’t even attempt Webull’s high offers for taxable brokerages or 3x referral madness for IRAs. I didn’t past their account opening KYC and they didn’t offer any methods to cure. That meant missing out on something like $5K.
“Offer valid for new Firstrade Brokerage accounts opened from 1/3/2024 to 2/2/2024 and funded within 30 days of account opening with $5,000 or more.”
Those are awful bonus tiers!
And I thought the etrade one was bad..
How so? I think it’s ok given the other options available at this time.
Would go for it but I still need to hold 4 months with E-Trade.
“The account must remain open for 12 months with the minimum funding or assets required for participating in the offer” is probably what puts off most.