Hooyacruster, Spydertrader gave you a link to a thread about funds stolen from E-trade accounts. If you read the entire thread, you will find that this happened to more than one E-trade customer, and that the thefts followed a pattern. You didn't read the entire thread that Spydertrader gave you. You would rather rely on other Elitetrader members, instead of doing your own homework. I think maybe you should read the entire thread Spydertrader gave you. If you won't do that, then I will echo previous comments. Avoid E-trade. One more piece of advice. If you are a new trader, then you need to trade small, to minimize your risk, so that you can afford to learn from lots and lots of mistakes. You can do this at, for example, Interactive Brokers, where the minimum commission is only one dollar. But it sounds like the minimum commission at etrade is much higher, which will force you to take much greater risks cover your trading costs, and this is not a wise choice for the new trader. I think a number of other brokers would provide you a more suitable commission structure. The downside of Interactive Brokers is that there is very little handholding, so that if you don't know what you are doing in terms of the mechanics of executing trades, you'll have to figure it out pretty much by yourself, with very, very little help from IB. But if you can get over this hump, then I think IB is your best bet. One final warning. You are going to discover that your results from real trading will be very different from your results from paper trading.
What are you going to be paying at eTrade and for what kind of trades (size & frequency)? I thought eTrade was going to charge you between $7 and $13 flat rate depending on number of trades (based on the link you provided). It sounded like you were going to be opening a $1000 account (or close to it) so I dont see why you think eTrade's rates are superior to IB or MBT which offers either per share pricing or flat rate (for small trades, per share would be much cheaper). It also doesn't sound like you understand settlement rules when trading from a cash account, perhaps I misunderstood your plan for avoiding daytrading rules though.
As I mentioned before I'm a beginner, and my only experience is through paper trading. So, I only want to start with the smallest trades possible. If I don't make any money to begin with that's fine as long as I don't loose a whole lot either.
This might help you as well: https://www.tradingdirect.com/Static/Help/cash_acct_trading.pdf (Item #2) Apologies if you are already familiar with how this works, it did not sound like you are but I could have misunderstood.