E-Trade Financial (Ticker Symbol: ETFC) is showing their appreciation to their loyal customers by offering one full day of commission free trading on Wednesday Dec 19, 2007. This is coming after E-Trade’s stock price recently plummeted on lending troubles followed by rumors of takeovers or bankruptcy.

As you may or may not know, I use E-Trade for all of my investing needs and I’ve always considered them to be one of the best online stock brokerage firms. So I was very worried when this happened, and took whatever money wasn’t invested in stocks out of my E-Trade account and into a more stable bank until the chaos ended.

With all that being said, I am not too impressed by this “show of appreciation”. I am not a day trader and I’m willing to bet that a good majority of E-Trade’s customers aren’t either. So the typical investor won’t benefit from this at all, unless they decide to go buying up stocks on Wednesday. However that is definitely a bad idea since the stock market is looking increasingly bearish and the average investor does not participate in short selling.

So really this doesn’t offer any value to E-Trade customers and I’m assuming that it’s intentional. Their image gets boosted while simultaneously not loosing much in potential commissions fees. If E-Trade really wanted to show their appreciation, they’d offer X amount of commission free trades instead of no commission fees on one specific day.