online brokerage suggestions

i've been a long-time fidelity customer and have a ton of products with them and have done all sorts of weird and wacky stuff with them. historically i've stuck with trading mainstream stocks so i've been happy with fidelity, even though it's a bit more expensive than other options.

however i've recently gotten into trading higher volumes in low-priced stocks (not pinks and bbs).

fidelity, schwab, td, and most brokers do not support this type of behavior via per-share commissions --- 35K shares at fidelity costs $750 or so to get in and out - it's not reasonable.

obviously i'm not (yet) a sophisticated consumer of these services, but i'm working on it .

i'm looking at ameritrade and scottrade - both support flat fees. ameritrade seems to provide a lot more "stuff" than scottrade. fwiw, $7 -vs- $11 is a wholly inconsequential delta.

any advice or pointers much appreciated.

tia,
doody.

 

I use Ameritrade, no complaints. If you trade penny stocks, make sure there is no per share charge.

Ed

 

Im on an active trader commission at Schwab. I get $9.95 commission for up to 5000 shares (market & limit orders). Pretty good deal. PLUS, I get to use their StreetSmart Pro/CyberTrader software, which includes live Dow Jones News (which usually costs $150 a month if you subscribe to professional quote services like Thomson One Financial).

You have to put in like 100 trades a quarter at schwab to receive this commission discount rate schedule.

 

i need an account that has a min. cash account size of about $700 and low commission. anyone have any ideas?

 

I had my first trade experience with Scottrade today via the net. I'm dumping some .50 stock I've owned for a couple of years. On sub $1.00/share equities, you must sell using a "Limit" order with Scottrade. The number of shares makes no difference. It's a flat $12 plus 1/2%. So a trade consisting of 2000 shares at .50 each will cost you $17. Equity trades above $1/share with a "Market" order cost $7.00 with no added %.

It was easy to use and worked well. I believe the minimum balance is $500. Cheap!

 

Scottrade is pathetic, wait until you have to sell and get frrozen out of their system. They don't due pink sheets online at all. Ameritrade is nice but the best system i ever used were AB Watley a few years ago. Very fast online or on the phone. Brown used to handle heavy traders well but went thru a lot of changes when bought out.
T

 

I initially had problems signing into Scottrade. If I was a daytrader or had a timing issue with critical stocks, I'm not sure I'd use it. But doing what I'm doing, it's perfect. I'm just selling off a block of stock at a time. Cheap and effective.

I said it in another thread, if something were to happen to the market, I'd be willing to bet all these internet trading companies "systems" would go crashing to their knees.

 

Scottrade is the king of churn. They spend their money on ads to attract the next bunch to replace the disillusioned and disappointed rather than spend on IT. They even admitted to me that they were having system problems when they cost me some money more than once. BobD ,In your case i would go with brown since they are only 5.00 a trade.
T

 

I just requested an application for a scottrade account. I dont like what i hear about it though. They say they have free dow jones streaming news.

 

I use Brown & Co (www.brownco.com). Trades are low cost and they typically have fast executions, the software doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles though.

 

Interactive Brokers (IB) is great if you are not trading 100's of thousands of shares a day - plus you can trade just about anything under the sun there.