Who should I trade with?

For trading, this board seems to be "the place" for garnering opinions on what's a good outfit to trade with. If you would, please provide your advice based on personal experiences and things you believe reliable in hearing.

I should obviously give my criteria, so here goes (hopefully, you can bear thru it!):
“adequate” executions—not expecting perfection of getting exact price I see all the time, but in trading stocks that mostly trade around half a million shares even on their lower volume days, I’d like to expect relatively little slippage.

With that, would like to find reasonable pricing per trade (will get to the amount and size of trades in a moment). I’ve only used Scottrade and, believe it or not, usually get a fill very close if not at the price I’ve entered. Haven’t traded a lot though, so I suspect over time I’d begin to rack up annoying slippages more than I’d like based on what I’ve heard from others regarding these more basic, online services. It’s price per trade is just $7, but would be willing to go a bit higher if necessary to ensure more consistently good fills. A fair share of traders might say I’d need more than that to really make a go of this as a business.

Trading size probably about only 500-1000 shares per trade. Would trade anywhere from zero to ten times per day, depending on the markets. Average number of trades per day, as expected based on that, somewhere about in the middle, maybe slightly on the low side—so about 50-100 trades per month, I’m guessing.

Minimal technical troubles with the brokerage site itself. How much of a bummer to have a trade in mind and then not be able to execute it due to some snafu on their end. If there are actually problems/mistakes made by the firm with my account, obviously would want speedy and customer-friendly resolution when warranted.

Reliable alarms: don’t want my stops far away, but also want to prevent MMs and specialists from manipulating the price temporarily to take them out (assuming they’d care about my very modest sized trades). But, also don’t intend to do anything like scalping, so I can possibly afford to allow my buys and sells to be triggered by alarms first and then deciding to make the trade manually.

To be able to place orders upon the open—only having a trade occur if the stock opens in a certain area. Otherwise, I would pass on it in these particular cases. However, would like the alarm or buy stop system to go into effect automatically (understandably placing these parameters before the market open) if the stock were to move to a certain point shortly after the open in these cases where the open-only orders weren't triggered.

Am OK with the current resources I have for stockpicking. At some point, I might want intraday screen filters trading decisions, but for now, I’m fine with the sites I use for studying and determining before the opens what I’m looking for the next day in the way of price movements and what trades I may want to enter prior to the open. [would, though, like the real-time data/graphs to be reliable]

One last thing: I have more than the $25K needed to trade frequently and will want to do plenty of shorting when the situation dictates (again, usually with stocks that trade at least moderately heavy)

Many thanks to anyone willing to help in advance.

 

I thought I had checked spelling, but missed a bit at the end. Next to last paragraph should have read:

Am OK with the current resources I have for stockpicking. At some point, I might want intraday screen filters to assist in trading decisions, but for now, I’m fine with the sites I use for studying and determining after the close what I’m looking for the next day in the way of price movements and what trades I may want to enter prior to the open. [would, though, like the real-time data/graphs to be reliable]

 

Just got a reply from Scottrade, and they don't provide open limit type orders described above. I kinda figured that, which limits their appeal, IMO.

As I think about it, if a brokerage offers the intraday screens I noted I don't need and it doesn't bump up the costs too much, I'm cool with that.

I have been reading another thread on IB. Maybe I'll check 'em out.