Im not going to lie, I am new to trading. I was wondering who is the best company to trade through and what their rates are? ex: TD Ameritrade, Schwab, etc.
I know many suggest Interactive Brokers. They have great low cost fees. I use thinkorswim because I could not meet the requirements for IB. TOS is priced decent, not as cheap as I would like but their customer service is great and software is pretty good too. Firms like TDA and Schwab are pretty expensive on the commission so if you plan on trading, go with someone else.
If you take a look a couple of threads ago, you'll see NOT to use Scottrade: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=116218&perpage=6&pagenumber=1 Other than that, my preference is for MB Trading. They have low commissions (about $5 per trade fixed price) and good, clean executions. You won't get the sort of charting features from them that you might get from some other places, but we don't really need charts on a day-to-day basis, and if we need them we can just look on Yahoo, so it works fine for us. Transferring money is easy and trades are fast and accurate. DON'T USE SCOTTRADE!
I have an Scottrade account but don't use it. For the few monthes I used it, I had no problem. Their customer service was great, execution was okay. A lot of great features but I rarely used them. $7 per trade with $500 opening is not too bad. They even gave me a few free trades when I opened the account but I would not use web-based for trading.