I Was using Ameritrade until last week and the worst/best thing happend to me. Their servers went down and I could not exit any of my postions. Once I sat on the phone for 10 min's waiting to talk to someone and then they said try this other server. They never once sent an email to anyone about what to do, why this happend, and a sorry. This made me look for another firn and now im opening an account with IB. I will save thousands with them its great!!
i used to use datek (now ameritrade) before IB. some days they would be so busy i could not log in to my account for like an hour. here's an email i sent to them one time: btw, i never got the free trades.
You will have bad experiences with all the lowest cost brokers (maybe not all, but all the ones I've tried). IB seems to be very good IMO. The per-share commissions rule out trading really super low priced issues and trading really large orders of higher priced stuff can be done cheaper with a per-order commission, it would be nice to have a really cheap per-order broker along with IB sometimes.
Before the merger between Datek and Ameritrade, I visited Datek headquarter in Jersey City, NJ. What surprised me the most was the fact that they had separate trading floor where they held customer's order to trade against their in-house order. And to tell to customers that the servers are busy, hmmm totally against business conduct. 60 sec guarantee is no where outta be. Because they already made their money holding customers' orders.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying that they almost never post about application servers or streamer problems on either the Trading Home page or in the Today's Hot Issues section of @nswerBox. But when investment.datek.com seems hosed, try investmenta.datek.com or investmentb.datek.com. Sometimes completely exiting your browser and starting it up again helps, as this will force a reload of the streamer java app. Schwab isn't very proactive at announcing Streetsmart Pro server downtime, either - if you call them up they'll tell you the servers are down and offer to have you place a trade with a human for no additional charge, and for an instant I always have this fantasy of making one of their brokers rattle off level II quotes for 15 minutes over the phone to me until I say "OK, trade!", but I chicken out and say, "that's OK, I'll use Velocity". Thankfully, Velocity or the Schwab web site never seem to go down.