I missed this thread on brokerages but I have a few comments.
I have an account at Fidelity and four at Ameritrade, as well as two at ETrade. Fidelity had held my 401(k). Ameritrade just looked interesting many years ago, and ETrade was one in a long line of successors to an account I had eons ago at the former Olde & Co. My Mom (family trust) has a few at other institutions including Wells Fargo Advisors (formerly Wachovia Securities), US Bank, Ameriprise and a regional firm called Oake Ridge Financial. Most of those last are 'full service' brokers. I hate full service brokers. The brokers themselves are outright impediments and the commissions are obscene.
By far the trading tools and user interface at TDAmeritrade are superior to anything the other firms mentioned offer. (I do believe TDA's much touted Think or Swim is congested, cluttered and incomprehensible, therefore unusable for me. For those who know how to use it, probably its great. I go for intuitive interfaces and hate kitschy bells and whistles that add no value. If I can't puzzle something out on my own, I don't want to bother with it.)
Fidelity's user interface may be the clunkiest thing around. It doesn't update account information such as average price for shares owned, net gains and losses, etc., in real time; you have to wait for the next day to see it. It is also difficult to find what you want; guesswork is the order of the day. Fidelity's charts are lame and their research capabilities aren't great.
That said, their commissions are very good, they are less prone to trading restrictions than TDA or ETrade.
The TDA and Fidelity customer service people are professional and very good, though I think TDA has the edge.
E-Trade customer service is a nightmare. All E Trade's frontline people that I have ever dealt with are seeming idiots. This is not hyperbole: over several years in my experience one hundred percent of them either have no idea what they are doing, fail to follow through on promises, provide totally misleading information or are otherwise useless. Some of this may be because the E Trade account is (and in the context of the market meltdown in 2008, it's important to add always has been) fairly small, well under $100K, and therefore there's no 'premium' service like Fidelity's, or 'Apex' like TDA's. Why do I keep them? Mostly because I like to have choices, and on rare occasions there was something I wanted to do that I couldn't with the other two firms, such as when Fidelity's or TDA's site crashes. And there is the matter of inertia, which is probably why they have any customers at all left. Every year or two after dealing with one of the 'idiots' I swear I will move the accounts -- if you stand at your window, face NC and listen hard you can hear me curse when this occurs -- but usually something more urgent intervenes.
Having accounts at TDA and Fidelity provides a big advantage as I can, for lack of a more polite and less crass-seeming term, if need be "play them off against" each other. That has worked well. For instance it has gotten commission concessions from TDA, and at times has gotten flexibility that Fidelity wasn't prepared to show initially such as options trading in my IRA.
Even apart from the commission structure, I wouldn't recommend the former Wachovia Securities to my worst enemy, and the Wells Fargo Advisors incarnation isn't much better. Astonishing high-handed block-headed bureaucracy. I don't have time to explain it, but the only FINRA complaint I have ever lodged was against Wachovia Securities for egregious record keeping violations -- they admitted they had no pertinent records -- that forced an expensive and totally unnecessary probate of my Dad's estate, not to mention freezing his account in late 2007 so I couldn't sell the once high-yielding money-center bank shares he had there before they collapsed into dust. Cost tens of thousands of dollars. There's a settlement pending.
I am moving some of Mom's stuff and spent a long time weighing where to direct it. TDA gets the preliminary nod for some.
AI
