Wow that $500 fee is rediculous.
With eTrade that 100,000 share trade would have only cost you $9.99.
And if you trade ALOT (I think its like a minimum of 60 trades per quarter), than the commission is only $7.50.
I don't place that many trades to get that lower rate.
But $500 is crazy.
The worst I've experienced is with a broker called SogoTrade.
Their commission rate is very good, $3.99.
But they charge a half percent for any stock priced under $1.
The other major issue I had with them is that online you can only place a maximum trade of 100,000 shares.
So back when I was trading sub-penny stocks of a million+ shares (sounds like alot, but not when its at 0.0002), I would have to call their phone brokers, who took 15 minutes to answer, and twice I had an issue where my buy or sell asks were met and nothing executed, only to call back and find out their broker's mistakenly never processed the order.
So I went to eTrade, was able to trade 2,000,000+ shares at that same $9.99 rate with no extra fees.
Unfortunately, could never make any money off sub-pennys, so I no longer trade those high volumes, but still have always been very happy with the service eTrade provides. Their orders execute faster than other broker's I've used too, which is a definite plus.
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