Discount online brokerage recommendation needed - lot of trading

[Ulysses]

I have a couple of accounts w/ traditional brokerages. They are fine and now have online access and everything, but the fees aren't great for doing a high volume of trading, which has never been an issue for me in the past.

However, I've recently decided to do a little more active trading. Both equities and options. Just for fun and education, really. I'll probably invest something like $20-50k in this to see how I do. For purposes of min. account balances and such, assume that I keep $20k in the acct. at all times.

Given those constraints, can anyone suggest the best online broker to go with?

I remember hearing once about some site where you can make an unlimited number of trades for some set fee within certain hours (and there's some fee within some window around the open/close or something like that). I don't know if that or any other funky setups are still around, but would love to hear about them.

Thanks.

[GeorgeF]

www.freetrade.com (http://www.freetrade.com)

[RocketManJames]

Mr. Ole,

TD Waterhouse gives 9.95 a trade up to 2500sh if you are very active. I have also heard good things about Interactive Brokers. Not sure of their rates.

Also, if you're going to be doing a lot of trading, you'll definitely want to keep more than 25K in your account. I believe that is the minimum balance for a PDT (Pattern Day Trader). And, if you make too many day trades within a rolling 5 day period, you'll be classified as one.

Stay away from Scotrade, as I have heard horror stories.

-RMJ

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Stay away from Scotrade, as I have heard horror stories.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've never had one problem with Scottrade. Scottrade ins't the brokerage you want to trade options though IMO. They don't do spreads and such or allow naked shorting of options. I don't trade that actively though so I don't know how Scottrade treats day traders.

[RocketManJames]

Depends on what kind of trading you do... If you short stocks, Scottrade is not a good one to do much trading with. Often times, my friend has to call their desk so that they can get shortable shares from some other source. And, as you pointed out, they are very limited on the options side of things. And, I'd say that 80% of the time I get a better price for a stock when we both execute a market order. But, this last point might not really be an apples to apples comparison, since we're not sitting at the same desk clicking simultaneously or anything.

But, Scottrade's customer service is excellent from what I hear.

-RMJ

[adios]

Good point about shorting stocks, I don't do it very much these days. I have though in the late 90's and didn't have problems. But yeah for shorting stocks I'd look elsewhere besides Scottrade. BTW I don't actually do very many market orders but what I've done the fills have been fine, a few better than I would have thought they'd be. Here's another problem with Scottrade that I thought about, you can't trade pink sheet stocks easily nor do you have access to the Toronto exchange.