What's the best online trading platform?
Question:
What are other competitors? I'd like one with no minimum, no maintance fees either.
Answer:
There are a lot of good brokererages depending on what you like and how you trade.
Barron's Online has a great article on brokerages that they publish each year. (I'll try to find you the link for the March 6,2006 article)
For basic stuff, E*Trade, Ameritrade, and Scottrade are sufficient. For more complex trades, I'd recommend Optionsxpress, ThinkorSwim, or interactivebrokers.
Based on what you put in your question on wanting affordable w/o inactivity fees, I'd recommend optionsxpress since they have no minimum activity that you're required to do. Further, they have some great strategy scans and a decent virtual trading platform to practice on.
Brokerages like Fidelity are horrible for anyone with any decent experience. Though they do have decent research stuff.
But for research, there are SOOO many places to find good stocks.
So, decide what's important to you as a trader and compare the brokers! You can use the article, or go to each website as they all seem to have comparison charts!
And if there are any other particular things that you want to mention as being most important to you (such as executions, cust svc, cheapest trade - which you mentioned, flexibility on allowing you to do certain types of trades, stop and stop limit orders, contingent orders, great graphing, what if scenarios, training, etc), I'll be glad to help discuss this with you too!
If you have any questions, let me know.
Hope that helps!
scottrade is what i use-there is a minimum of $500 bucks but that aint much.
cheap trades and very good tools and easy to use- go to scottrade.com and take a tour
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