We were pretty hard on Zecco when it launched a little more than a year ago. Their zero commission brokerage service raised a number of red flags. In particular, we were worried that they would attract only the very low end of the market.
Despite our criticism, the company soldiered on. They’ve built out their trading platform to to get the heavy day traders to use them, and launched a social site called Zeccoshare that allow like-minded investors to share opinions on stocks (which in turn drives transactions). They say they’ll soon begin to harness the collective intelligence of those users to get even more data about stock to traders. There are others experimenting in this space as well.
Today the company is announcing a $25 million round of financing, adding to the $10 million they previously raised. They’re also filling out their executive team quite nicely. Who knows, maybe, just this once, we were wrong when we called them a loser.
We’ll just put Etrade into the deadpool instead.