Now, anyone who visits Zecco.com can create a free account and begin using ZeccoShare, a financial social networking community.

"The power of ZeccoShare is its transparency," said Jeroen Veth, Zecco's chief executive officer. "The old stock trading blogs and forums let traders debate and share investing ideas, but there was no way to filter out hype and wishful thinking from serious investing insight. ZeccoShare changes all of that.

"With ZeccoShare, you can view other people's real, verified portfolio holdings and previous trades, so you have to put your money where you mouth is," Veth added. "For instance, if a member calls a stock a 'strong buy' in a forum post, any ZeccoShare member can verify that the poster actually owns, or has owned, that stock. The beauty of ZeccoShare is that although your trading behavior is verified, you and your personal information remain anonymous. You can have - and demand - credibility while keeping your private affairs private."

ZeccoShare is much more than shared portfolios and one-on-one stock tips. Portfolio data, holdings and trade information are aggregated across all ZeccoShare member profiles. Members can scan listings of most-held and most-traded stocks, create specific groups of like-minded investors (such as "socially responsible investing", "women on investing", or "value investing"), participate in discussion forums, blog, chat and more.

In addition to the one-of-a-kind ZeccoShare community, Zecco.com provides access to free stock trading through its wholly owned subsidiary Zecco Trading, where investors can make 10 free stock trades per month, every month, when they maintain an asset balance of $2,500. Otherwise, trades are just $4.50 each, one of the lowest commissions in the brokerage industry. There is no minimum balance required to open or maintain an account.

"ZeccoShare is a vibrant and intelligent financial community for self-directed individual investors," said Gabriel Dalporto, Zecco's chief strategy and marketing officer. "We hope all investors will come to Zecco.com for every phase of the investing process - from idea generation to research to trade execution. ZeccoShare makes research easier by linking investors to other traders, allowing them to share information for each other's mutual benefit. They can then follow with an actual free stock trade at Zecco Trading. These new features combined with our free stock trades and low-commission options trades make Zecco a leader in the online investing world."