The Free Brokers love Market Orders, that's how they make their bank. There are Pseudo Free Brokers who charge you for not using limit orders or for taking liquidity. Were you a ECN Rebate trader when you were a PDT? Try Etrade, personally I hate Fidelity and Schwab's tools are limited unless you use TD Ameritrade platform. Edit: Free Brokers new way of gaining revenue is through option trading, options trading from noobs is making up for all the lost revenue from the days of commissions.
I was a PDT trader at Lightspeed and I used only market orders so I had to pay for taking liquidity. I use TDA's TOS platform for options as they are King of options but from what I understand they are a little slow in stock execution. I will probably go with Interactive Brokers because they are the only broker that you can execute trades for stocks within the Sierra Charts Platform. I thought TOS was very good but Sierra Charts takes everything to a whole new level. It is more expensive because you have to pay to get the tick by tick quote feed but that increases the capabilities.
Are you correcting @VEGASDESERT when he says the fees on 100 shares of Apple will be 75 cents for a round trip? Have you actually traded Apple and not paid any fees? When I was a PDT there were fees in addition to the commission so I was wondering what traders are actually paying now for a roundtrip of 100 shares of Apple.
When you daytrade there are no commissions but there are exchange fees when you sell. I got my questions answered on IB's website.
I don't use IB - I prefer multiple venues of communication including in-person. The exchange fees are standard and universal. Options contracts are less than $1. No assignment fees. I don't really notice any issues with odd lots. Of course, nothing is really free. The brokers make a killing on margin interest and selling order flow to Citadel, etc. *Look up the Anton Kreil video on the brokerage "inversion narrative" for a real mind trip. It's been my experience that it is not hard to find stocks to short except for the hard-to-borrow (I don't bother) and the flavor-of-the-day small cap (which is probably Reg Sho anyways).