I wonder if any US based or US equities trading broker allows trading with less than $25K? Thanks for any tips.
Nope, I believe that'd be agin' the law. (SEC rules) At least as far as stocks and options. Index futures and forex aren't subject to this.
http://www.alliancetrader.com/ They're not a US-based company, but you can trade US stocks through them--and not just 4 round trips every 3 days, or whatever the rule is. I believe they get around the PDT rule by being based offshore (Jamica). I don't know anything about them, but I remember hearing about them when the PDT rule first came out, so they've been around for a while. I'm pretty sure that your funds are not SIPC protected, so just hope they don't go belly-up!
I was also looking for an offshore broker that allowed PDT with sub $25k balances. I found that Alliance Investments site linked above and realized that it had not been updated since 2004. Further investigation found that they changed websites to www.allianceinvestment.com/. Now this site seems to still be up to date but no longer mentions PDT for sub $25k and no longer seems to offer any real time trading platform. They now only offer a web based platform. I did email them asking if they still offered the old platform but never got a response back. My suggestion is forget about these guys.
I don't know how to get around the $25k for stocks, but you could consider futures where account starting balances are $5k or under at some firms.