Recently I opened a new Roth IRA with E-Trade Financial. I used to hold my Roth IRA with Sharebuilder, but I've been unhappy with them of late. They do offer some abilities that E-Trade doesn't, such as purchasing partial shares (which was nice--it meant I could hold stock in Google without having to buy the whole stock if I didn't feel like it), but doing automatic investing, automatic deposits, and similar were all overly complicated. Also, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to add other types of investments to my account (for instance bonds, CD's, etc.). I like that it automatically put un-invested funds into a money-market, which is something that I'm generally pretty excited about, but that's enough enough to keep me.

I've worked with E-Trade before, sort of. They recently bought HarrisDirect, which is who I had first opened an account with way back when. Before I could fund it and start using it, however, they were bought out and my log in stopped working. During the transferring of accounts, mine essentially got lost in their system, which would have been a big deal if I had had a chance to fund it already, but since there wasn't any cash in it I just decided to stick with what I already had--Sharebuilder. I looked over the things that E-Trade offered at the time, and decided it really wasn't a big deal for the measly bits of cash that I was putting in. Now, E-Trade offers more services and tools that I can appreciate, and I can deposit more in the way of retirement donations in order to make full use of the things they can do for me. So now it's very much a win-win.

I'm deciding now what stocks I intend to invest in as I build up my capital pool. Google is just generally a good idea to buy into, and that's on the list. Microsoft might be on the list at some point, but I'm not sure. Apple will be on the list, of course, and definitely before June, and that leads me to my need to diversify my interests. Tech stocks aren't the end-all be-all of the investing world. Cost Plus World Market is probably a good investment but I want to study their charts a bit before I commit, and other than that, I'm trolling around a bit for some additional stocks from other sectors.