Built with an emphasis on speed, Firstrade's new platform features a highly intuitive user interface, cutting-edge advanced trading tools, comprehensive research and exceptionally fast trade execution, allowing investors to quickly discover and act on trading opportunities at a low $6.95 commission.

"For nearly 25 years, we have sought to empower the individual investor," said John Liu, president and CEO of Firstrade. "This next generation platform, built from the ground up with proprietary technology, allows us to continue to deliver our fundamental value to investors -- lower costs, higher standards."

Features of the new Firstrade platform include:

* Intuitive User Interface: Built with the active trader in mind, the Firstrade platform's landing page presents all of a client's important information in a customizable dashboard.

* Order Entry & Management Panel: Investors can research and trade stocks and options from every page of the Firstrade platform through an order entry panel.

* Advanced Trading Tools and Comprehensive Research: The platform offers intuitive tools active traders need to screen investments and make informed decisions. Some of the new features include: Advanced Dynamic Screeners, Stock Alerts by email and SMS, X-Stream streaming quotes and charts, research from S&P reports and the latest information from IPO, splits and earnings calendars.

* Advanced Order Types: Traders can utilize trailing stop and conditional orders online to automatically adjust to market movements.

* Social Media Integration: The platform has fully integrated Facebook and Twitter capabilities allowing investors to share and discuss their trading activities with real friends in their social networks who they know and trust. Investors are able to determine what aspects of the transaction they would like to communicate such as the number of shares, share price and transaction total.

* iPhone App: Investors can access Firstrade securely anywhere in the world and trade stocks and options on-the-go through a highly intuitive iPhone interface. The iPhone app is available free from the App Store.

* Extended Trading Capabilities: Firstrade's new trading platform offers extended trading before and after hours between 8:00am-9:25am and 4:05pm-5:30pm Eastern Time.

"We understand speed is very important to our clients, from the execution, system performance, ease of use and interface design of the Firstrade platform, all the way to customer service efficiency," added Liu. "The new platform is another way in which we will provide investors with greater value. We will use our proprietary technology to continually add innovative features to our trading platform to better serve our clients and help them achieve their investment goals."

Firstrade offers $6.95 per trade including online stocks, options, over 11,000 mutual funds, exchange traded funds, bonds, treasuries, agencies and CDs online. Firstrade also offers retirement accounts, including Traditional and Roth IRAs. There is no minimum deposit to open a Firstrade account and no inactivity or maintenance fees.