In Jauary 2004 I plan to contribute another $9,000 to Roth IRA. That is $6,000 for my wife's Roth IRA (for tax year 2003 and tax year 2004) and $3,000 for my Roth IRA (for tax year 2004). Currently I have a Roth IRA account with balance of over $8,000 in Fidelity.

I'm currently considering the available options as of where to set up the Roth IRA accounts.

For my wife's account, my current thinking is to set up the account at Brownco.com. BrownCo asks for $5,000 contribution to IRA accounts to qualify. That's why I must contribute two year's worth of eligible contributions in one shot. The main driver is to get access to the JPMorgan research report. This will become a valuable resources to me in addition to my current free access to research reports from S&P, Argus, Smith Barney and Lehman Brother. Admittedly this will add more administrative labor (to get used to a new interface). It will be slightly compensated by the low transaction price of $5/trade.

For the additional $3,000 contribution to my Roth IRA, I'm considering to add that to my existing Fidelity account so I can avoid most of the paperwork to open a new account. This seems to the painless way to me with almost none paperwork necessary, and the commission of $14.95 per trade is still acceptable.

I used to think this will bring a drawback because as I already entertained a good apprecication in my current Roth IRA ($2,000+ capital gain out of the original $6,000 contribution), if I lose money in the new contributions, I'll not have the option to close the account and recognize tax loss. However, after some research I noticed that both Fool.com and Kiplinger.com reported that in order to claim a tax loss in Roth IRA I need to close all my Roth IRA accounts. In addition, tax loss in IRA accounts are considered miscellaneous itemized deduction -- so it's only useful when the total miscellaneous itemized deduction exceeds 2% of AGI.

So, I'll go ahead to contribute $3,000 to Fidelity. After all, Roth IRA is for long-term tax free growth, so I'm unlikely to withdraw for claiming petty cash tax benefits anyway.