Recently my wife and I have been checking out the discount brokerage site zecco.com. They ask for what seemed like an unusually large amount of confidential information to setup a trade account. I don’t remember filling out this much when I setup my Sharebuilder or any other online financial accounts, and yet Zecco is asking for things like: liquid cash, net income, where I work, my government ID number (driver’s license) and more.

And why do they require me to tell them how many years experience I have trading stock, mutual funds and options? Again, I don’t recall having to provide any other company this information and I’m not paranoid about providing it, but it makes me wonder why they need it. Are they selling this information to marketing companies?

The Zecco interface and setup process is not very intuitive. Don’t expect something fancy with a lot of charts and graphs like Sharebuilder, but real time trades for free — up to 10 a day and 40 a month — remains an appealing offer. We found it took a good week to get our initial account and deposits setup.

A few times I’ve experienced login problems during trade hours which has been disconcerting. Hopefully when I need to buy or sell, Zecco let me in.

My first three Zecco trades
GMO - AMEX - Idaho General Mines, info via Google Finance:

is engaged in the business of exploration, development, and if warranted, the mining of properties containing molybdenum, as well as silver, gold, base metals and other specialty metals. It has a 30-year renewable lease for the lands related to, possesses surface rights for, and owns patented and unpatented claims to, the Mount Hope Project, a primary molybdenum property, located in Eureka County, Nevada.

Purchase price: $7.58
Amount of shares: 15

Reasoning: Although precious metals tend to be very speculative and mining guarantees nothing, I like the fact they have 30 year renewable lease and the location they are mining so if they find good quantities of specialty metals, they will be able to mine them efficiently (hopefully) and cost effectively. They announced a management change yesterday.

BQI - AMEX - Oilsands Quest Inc, info via Google Finance:

is focused on business opportunities in the oil and gas sector, and in particular the oil sands and oil shale sectors in western Canada … explores for and develops oil sands deposits in the Province of Saskatchewan and is conducting an oil sands exploration program.

Purchase price: $3.37
Amount of shares: 30

Reasoning: Another exploration stock that from January to June was on a downward trend, turning around a bit in July. It appears to have hit the cellar and could be rebounding now that they have announced the potential of 10 billion barrels of bitumen. Again, very speculative like GMO and will need to watch this one closely and carefully.

ATAR - NASDAQ - Atari, info via Google Finance:

is a global publisher and developer of video game software for gaming enthusiasts and the mass-market audience, and a distributor of video game software in North America. The Company develops, publishes and distributes games for all platforms, including Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Portable (PSP); Nintendo Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Wii and DS; Microsoft Xbox and Xbox 360, and personal computers (PCs). It also publishes and sublicenses games for the wireless, Internet and other evolving platforms.

Purchase price: $2.81
Amount of shares: 30

Reasoning: I’ve always liked Atari despite being disappointed in many of their moves as a company. Still, they’ve managed to produce some great titles over the year that seem to never die like Missile Command which just made an appearance on Xbox Live last week for 400 Microsoft Points.

This week at E3 Atari announced they will have online capability for the popular Dragon Ball Z franchise. Also announced, but I’m not as excited about another Godzilla title or the board game Jenga being converted to videogame.

You’ve played Jenga, right? It’s the one where you take pieces of blocks out and try not to be the one who brings it all crashing down. Some board games just don’t translate as well to videogames and I think Jenga might be one of them, but since it’s the first time the game is making the hop, it could be a seductive title played online. Atari seems to be targeting the Jenga port to the Wii. I hope Atari considers an Xbox 360 port too with Xbox Live as the Nintendo Wii online gameplay isn’t comparable to Xbox Live. That’s something you can’t do with board games: play them across the world in other living rooms and it’s an opportunity I hope Atari sees.

Making video games without an online component these days is extremely risky.

This morning my buddy Darkmoon brought up that he was tracking Atari and I thought why not at a penny stock price of a couple bucks put a little Atari in the portfolio? They laid off 20% of their workforce back in May so perhaps they are leaner and meaner as a company now. The big risk with videogame companies these days is that games are so expensive to make that even one bad title can have a severe impact on the bottom line. I hope yet another Godzilla title — perhaps historically a creature that should have stayed in Japanese movies and never made the jump to video games — isn’t a new title that the gaming rags delight in disemboweling.

Strategy going forward
My wife has the early lead in our competition with about a week’s head start in the competition. Her portfolio is up overall $38.40 ($538.40) and mine as of this writing is up $3.90 ($503.90). She bought 20 shares of SHOR at $12.15 and 16 shares of MXWL at $15.40.

My plan for the competition is to continue studying and try and implement several smaller hopefully strategic trades which take advantage of the Zecco 10 free trades a day and 40 a month. With the limited starting money in the portfolio, I’m probably not going to make many trades on stocks over $10. I also entered the Fool Caps competition and will be putting some of my real trades and perhaps some hypothetical trades there as well.

As mentioned earlier in the week, we’re sharing our Google Finance spreadsheet with our stock competition trade activity so others can stop by and see how we’re doing.

• Zecco free trades going away, unless you have $2,500 minimum balance
• Share your Zecco trading activity with Zeccoshare now in beta
• 2007 stock competition results and free real time stock quotes
• Picking stocks by name strategy
• Paying first Zecco commissions, taking first loss
• Stock trade commissions declining, a buck a trade good for investors