For too many years, complexity and cleverness were used to seemingly create value out of thin air. Risky no-doc, no-money-down loans were sliced and diced, wrapped and repackaged to emerge as safe triple-A investments and enable minimum wage earners to buy …

For a while, Zecco had one great advantage over a lot of other online stock brokerages -- the offer of free stock trades if you can handle a small requirement. Just open your online stock brokerage account with them for $2,500 and you would be entitled to 10 free stock …