Yes, Jerry -- it is pretty easy to move. I got all my Mom and Dad's stuff moved from Merrill Lynch to Vanguard with one form and no hassle.
Setab: I had a SSB account for some years -- what you have to realize is that your friend will call you with 'trading ideas' every week or two, and your desire to be reasonable and friendly (and possibly make some money)will be the 3-in-1 Oil which gets you to make investments with him/her. Thereafter you'll be trading ina nd out of all kinds of neat stuff, leaving a few percent here and a few percent there in your broker's pocket. You might even make some money, too. The advice you'll get here is well-documented: Just don't go there. Get some good diversified long term index funds and keep your friendship with the SSB person strictly non-financial.
True Story re: SSB:
In 1999 had stock in a small public internet company which I'd received as payment for my first company. I used SSB to help me sell it in the Nasdaq (read clip joint/rigged) market.
I told my SSB broker I wanted to lock in a certain amount of profit, and I was prepared to sell some stock at decent intervals to do so, and we made a few trades.
He then came up with the bright idea/cold call one day that I should write call options on some of my remaining holdings, pocket some premium, and maybe the options would expire and I could do it again. To my shame, I agreed, pocketed 50k of premium - $1 per share - (he got about 3k commission and whatever the spread was on this option, which was no doubt significant)
If I had been thinking, I would have realized that what I really needed to be doing was buying put options (to lock in current prices), not selling call options (picking up premium and giving the other party the upside in the stock). Then again, if my SSB broker had been thinking, as he is supposed to do, he would have also come to the same conclusion.
6 months later, the options expired, and the buyer pocketed about $1.5 million in appreciation on his 50k option investment. In order to lock in profits, I had actually needed to sell another chunk of stock (I vaguely understood my mistake a few days after I'd sold the options, and so made the trade), so I missed out on the upside not only on the optioned shares, but on another similarly-sized batch as well.
It is all water under the bridge, and I never did anything except stop taking phone calls from the SSB broker, but it is a true story and should perhaps be a warning to you that these guys are not as bright as they are cracked up to be, and you should not rely on them. My broker was very fixated on earning his 3k commission, and as a result I did lose a significant sum of money following poor advice.