stock trading brokers

I did some research about the available stock brokers around fall of 2007. Here i am blogging some info; not too much well laid out but you will nevertheless get the import. If you yahoo search best online stock brokers or top brokerages etc. you pretty much get a good list of stock brokers out there. I have not yet started on options and am primarily interested in being a long term investor. The sites that i went thru during this phase was kiplinger, money and general google search for existing frustrated customers. This you can get by keying "Ameritrade sucks" and you see the plethora of results out there. Nevertheless, I ended up with them. So what are the criteria chosen for selecting brokers? Well obviously cost is one thing in mind. When i started considering other factors like quality of execution and research, I figured out that execution-wise most of the transactions are computerised and being a software guy myself know that there does not exist much difference between this factor. So say you spot citi shares at 30$ and Zecco will execute it in the same nano second as say a Goldman sachs or Merrill Lynch brokerage service software. Research wise, I think Fidelity or TRowe Price are pretty solid. Anways, I am not going to listen too much to any analyst either. Couple of months ago, no analyst worth the salt recommended a sell on citi and then the subprime thing happened. And now the same intelligent "analyst" who read the news from the same source as you did, tells you to sell it. Thats a clean way for banks and brokerages to make money. Anyways, being a long term investor, I would be probably holding it for a good number of years. The main emphasis I had was on the cost factor since I already had retirement accounts with Fidelity and TRP, Vanguard who give me good quality advise about stocks. I also looked at non online discount brokerage firms like mbtrade which run on custom software.
All most all firms charge annual fees if the account is IRA. Otherwise they charge closing fees.Scottrade and firstrade dont. The broker name, commision, ira fees, general review available in that order as follows:
Scottrade, 7, 0, good one
ameritrade, 10, 75, good one - (website is ok)
bankofamerica, 0(provided you have 25k in savings), 75 - not that good, ratings are pretty bad
fideltity,vanguard,trp-high fees
tradeking-5, 50, so-so to good enuf, i think this is good for non-ira
firstrade-7,0,good enuf, good promotions too but is not scottrade a better brand for the same features and has more users? i did not get what differentiates this two - maybe the trading portal.
zecco-0(really, for the first 10 trades if you have 2.5k which is good enuf), 50, good enuf ratings - some say website not that good - I agree it has a bit too much features. Also instead of having RIA on crappy Microsoft they should be having it in more flexible Java based applications. After all if you are doing things for free you need to have a biz model which factors in these costs. Having said that most of allegations that i found about this site in online blogs turned out to be untrue. For eg. opening account is hard and this and that, I just tried opening with nothing to lose and found that it is pretty good. I am quite conservative but found their way of working appropriately californiac. If these guys play the chips well in the coming future, then we have a good game at hand in the broker space. IMHO, there is no fun without disruptors. I have an account with them which is going good till now. overall the service is also good though being a social networking broker they display ads aka myspace or facebook. also it will be good if you have good knowledge about how to browse thru.
etrade-12.99 and overall ok
izone-5, 50, pretty good, parent is ameritrade, so you have a good backup there. and the big plus here - you can transfer out for FREE if it is from ameritrade to izone. Email them and confirm it and then trade free for 45 days with ameritrade(if they have the promo) and then transfer out after an year to izone. now you have pretty low sell commision(5 instead of 10 bucks). This is what I did. Izone site requires you to be really good user of computer since it has nothing other than buy and sell. which is good since i like plain vanilla website, software and ice cream. no frills, no phone - just buy and live in Dakota quietly.
All the transfer outs are 50 bucks from x to y.
Choice trade- same as izone except the transfer out feature
mbtrade - 1$(100 shares),20, so-so to good, custom software and you can trade from your computer. no need of browser and web based security issues. I like this one and might open an account with this guys in future.

So apart from TD/Izone, I opened up zecco too। Both these accounts are doing fine - broker commission wise. Next in line would be MBtrade and maybe tradeking or scottrade or for that matter anybody new which might come with some good pricing structure.
Ssssarrry that I did not organise the above info properly but could not find the table structure to copy paste from my excel onto this pad. But hey this is blog and am lazy. So mail me if you find anything new that can be added to this post. Thanks!