As a holder of two Vanguard ETFs (VWO, BND) which I hold for myself and my two kids (in separate custodial accounts) in a TD Ameritrade (AMTD) brokerage account, I decided to let AMTD know that I was considering switching my business over to Vanguard unless they had plans to launch similar commission-free ETF trading for their brokerage clients. After all, Fidelity is allowing its brokerage customers to trade iShares ETFs commission-free now so why shouldn't AMTD be able to work out a similar deal with a major ETF issuer with a diverse line of basic index funds like iShares or State Street?

While friendly, the representative I spoke with informed me (after a querry with the 'back office') that AMTD had no plans to offer commission-free ETF trading in the near future. He knew I would be disappointed with that news but couldn't really find anything else of value to say to offset my concerns.

Next, I decided to give E*TRADE Financial (ETFC) a call to see if maybe TD Ameritrade's lack of pursuit of commission-free ETF trading was somehow an outlier. The response I got was nearly identical - beyond the 60-day free trading period when you first open an account, there were no plans for E*TRADE to offer commission-free ETF trading in the near future.

As a result, I will in all likelihood leave TD Ameritrade as my brokerage account in the near future and switch over to one of the brokers currently offering free ETF trading. Even though we're not talking heavy trading (I make between 5 and 10 trades a year total between my own and my two kids' accounts), the $100 to $200 I spend a year on trading (each trade generally involves a sale and a purchase meaning $20 in commission) will add up over time, especially when you consider the effects of compounding interest.

Additionally, commission costs have stopped me from making moves on several occassions: better not to spend $20 (or what works out to 1% on a $2,000 position), my thinking went, unless I'm fairly certain I'm making the right move. Having free trading would allow me to chase alpha far more actively, something that has been difficult until now with the relatively prohibitive cost of trading commissions, even at deep-discount brokers.

I've pointed this out time and again, but the Nasdaq-100 is a flawed index. First, many people take it as a proxy for "technology," which it is not: only 65% of the fund is devoted to technology, with the rest tied up in healthcare, consumer discretionary and more.

But more importantly, the index's unusual weighting methodology — somewhere between market cap weighting and price weighting — means that the weights assigned different components are entirely out of whack. For instance, Microsoft (MSFT) is twice as large a company as Apple (AAPL) ($346 billion vs. $164 billion), but Apple has twice the weight of Microsoft in the index (12.3% vs. 6.5%). The fund is also very concentrated in its largest holdings, with 46% of the fund in the top 10 holdings.

My opinions in no way reflect those of Seeking Alpha; they're just one man's opinions. I too often miss great articles (I have a two-month old baby so there's no way for me to read it all) and may think something is great while you think it's no big deal.

These pieces all appeared on Seeking Alpha over the last two days (May 25-56):

Hard Assets Investor: Commodity Equity ETFs Get Active - What About Futures?

Claymore Securities filed to launch three new actively managed commodity equity ETFs last week. HAI's Lara Crigger goes in depth into the filings, parsing the likely make-up of these products and the proposed management strategy.

ETF Grind: Why Investors Should Avoid TIP

According to the author: 'The TIP is a smartly designed fund with an attractive expense ratio and plenty of liquidity. But it has one fatal flaw: TIPs haven't been tested in truly inflationary times, and are thus a much riskier investment than most people think.'

Andy Hagans: Building an All-ETF Ivy Endowment Portfolio

There are money managers who can and do consistently beat the markets. Andy Hagans tries to help retail investors extraplate Yale Endowment's David Swenson's asset allocation model to a simple ETF portfolio.

Michael Johnston: Under the Hood of 'Target Retirement Date' ETFs

One of the latest ETF products to pick up steam are Target Date Funds, which seek to provide investors with a 'full' portfolio in a single fund, rebalancing in favor of less risk as the fund's target date approaches. The author goes behind the funds and examines their make-up while pointing out drawbacks such as 'double layering' of expenses and the overlooking of other asset allocation factors other than date of retirement.

The new report shows that 71.9% of actively managed large-cap funds trailed the S&P 500; 75.9% of actively managed mid-cap funds trailed the S&P MidCap 400; and a stunning 85.5% of actively managed small-cap funds trailed the S&P SmallCap 600.

S&P says the results were consistent with the previous five-year cycle, from 1999 to 2003.

The article goes on to describe what can really only be described as pathetic performance of active mutual funds across various market cap sizes, global funds (including emerging markets where the performance of actively managed funds was especially attrocious compared to their index peers) and the bond market. One notable exception to the general rule of underperformance came in the high yield bond market. Other than that, the performance of actively managed funds vs. their passively indexed peers was either bad or awful.

Which leads me to wonder: Why does anyone bother trying to beat the market? Or to focus that, it's one thing for the pros to try - they have to believe they do what they do because they're really good at it (even if that's clearly not true year in and out). But why do individual, amateur investors try to beat the market? It seems like an excersize in futility at best and more likely than not, a surefire way to underperform the markets.

The bottom line is this: the average retail investor would be much better served buying the right mix of assets through low priced ETFs (expense ratios are the one factor most investors can - and often fail to - control). In addition to the added free time they'll gain (don't they say that time is money), they can rest assured they won't be underperforming the markets. Then they can spend their time evaluating what level of risk they can tolerate - something which came as a shock to many who thought it was much higher than it really was during the recent downturn. Switching into low-risk bonds when they Dow fell below 10,000 would have been a much more fruitful strategy for most than trying to outmaneuver a sinking ship of a market over the last year and a half.