As per experience, if you have a good relationship with Etrade, you can do fund transfer and it will take them a day to pull it from you bank but it is available immediately for trade. I haven't done money transfer from my schwab to etrade. What you can do is issue a check to your self from schwab checking and if you got a good relationship with your recipient bank that money will be available immediately too. Schwab and Etrade have debit cards as well but limited withdrawal daily. The best thing is utilize checking account that you can issue to yourself if you want to withdraw big amount like $100,000 for example. I've done it multiple times. Then, you make a transfer from your bank to Etrade and it will be available immediately. You can apply margin account to etrade with min of $2,000 and $25,000 for pattern day trading.