E*TRADE Financial Reviews

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Technologically advanced and opportunity to learn

Cons – Lack of leadership and talent retention

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Flexible place to work at...

Cons – they take advantage of people and make them work hard but don't pay them the money worth their job

Advice to Senior Management – No comments

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good Managers
Good work/life balance
Good base salary and earnings potential
Relaxed work environment

Cons – Operational side is still a work in progress, not on the same page with sales. Can be more difficult for customers to open and transfer accounts, compared to larger firms.
Commission plan changes often, consultants now get charged back for giving customers promotions, if customer moves from stock to cash, and you will get charged back if clients moves money out, causing wild swings in bonus.
I feel like this job has more Pros than Cons compared with other jobs I've had.

Advice to Senior Management – Overall I’ve been happy with management, they give you space and offer help when needed. It would be nice if we could get more help with service issues and just focus more of our time on sales.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – o Great people to work with, great atmosphere, and very subtle politics among management people (one that is not obvious and weighing on the rank-and-file workers).
o Competitive salary.
o Fair performance appraisal, which may result in a bonus.
o Night and day shift jobs.

Cons – o Holidays are US-based; work still ongoing on Philippine holidays (but I guess that's a Pro for the double pay!).
o Management doesn't seem to want to keep their agents with the company (little to no agent retention).
o Management seems to want to maximize an agent for all their worth and not look into increasing their pay.
o Benefits are standard but nothing extra to make you want to stay with the company.

Advice to Senior Management – You guys might want to improve on your agent retention. E*TRADE is not just a "stepping stone" company. You might want to have agents work there until retirement. Loyal agents build goodwill for the company and touch your clients in a profound way. And please look into better employee benefits and aligning their pay to their workload.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – E*Trade has one of the strongest technology teams I have seen. It has a great working environment and many of the people have been with E*Trade for a number of years. This makes them very knowledgeable in what they do and that makes things so much easier

Cons – The only issue with E*Trade is stability of the company. You hear so many rumors of it getting acquired or not having a rosy future, you feel like you are on an unstable platform that may topple any minute.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Good team and there's a ton of knowledge to be learned.

Cons – Nothing negative about working here.

Advice to Senior Management – None

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good benefits and the vacation request process is easy to manage. Casual work environment. Expect to wear slacks and shirts. E*TRADE will train & pay for your Series 7 & 63. Good place to learn call-center experiences, brokerage industry experiences, stock-plan, retirements accounts. 6 months to apply for promotion.

Cons – Expect to work with non-traditional hours when you first start. Sat & Sun can be your workday. Your manager, depending on who, can be a micromanager. The company will expect you to "sale" leads to Financial Consultants, or Active Trader Consultants, but reward you very little in compensation. Along with compensation, it should be higher. E*TRADE will expect you to do a lot.

Advice to Senior Management – Compensate associates more for the works they do.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Exciting, dynamic, and challenging place to work. Worked with a lot of smart, intelligent, motivated people. You will be rewarded when taking on additional responsibilities while continuing to perform at a high level.

Cons – Work/life balance can be a bit difficult at times. I definitely felt that people who knew how to play the game, but were by no means all-stars, were unfairly rewarded and promoted over smarter, harder working, higher performing employees who were less socially savvy.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – The life-work balance is great. Everyone is focused on business while in the office then go home.

Cons – Financial services in general isn't a growth industry at the moment so opportunities are limited.

Advice to Senior Management – Take more risks with current technology and embrace ideas that may not yield big ROI in the near term but can differentiate us from the competition going forward.

Former Employee – worked at E*TRADE Financial full-time for more than a year

Pros – For the work required the pay is pretty good. I have generally had a good experience with the people I work with...they generally do not hire the kind of person one normally associates with a brokerage firm (slicked hair, angry etc). Good base pay. I have made many, many friends who I will always be in contact with. Local Management has always been good to me.

They are very good about not requiring late hours, weekend work etc.

Cons – The comp plan for sales associates is the worst thing that has ever been excreted out of a human mind. Its very core is designed to cost you money at every turn. Client dies? Likely you will lose money. Client buys a house? You lose money. Client sells Mutual Funds? You lose money. And don't confuse this with a loss of retention or some hypothetical loss of continuing payments. You literally are charged from your bonus dollar for dollar. In other words, everything you sell will one day come back to cost you just as much, if not more (if it's value went up), than you were paid to sell it in the first place. Thousands of dollars a quarter will disappear due to things you have 0 control over. I won't go into too much detail, but I will say that when this plan was introduced to me I scoffed at the hypothetical losses I saw coming.

Unfortunately they are not hypothetical anymore.

Advice to Senior Management – They live in their own world. I won't bother.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company