I am a day trader by profession and although primarily trade other financial products, I have had a equities account with Scottrade for 1 year now. Most of the tools and resources that Scottrade offers are sufficient for most investors. For advanced traders they might come up short, but you likely have other services that fill in the gaps. Their chartign and technical indicators are sufficient. The screening tools for stocks, mutual funds and EFT are very usefule when you know the criteria for the investments you want. Simply enter your filtering criteria and you get a list that can be further filtered if desired.
With that said, I had several problems with their setup and getting what was promised (free trades). Initially it took longer than normal to get my deposit credited to my account. I was referred by an existing account holder so me and the account holder would receive 3 free trades. I received my first placed trade for free, but then had to pay for the next several before getting my free trades back after contacting my local broker office. The reason is when you input a trade the free trade is marked internally in their system as used, but if you modify or delete the order before it is actually fullfilled then the system is not designed to credit your account. This must be done manually by their employees. Due to human error, this doesn't alays happen. Because of the system design, if you input several positions, only the first 3 entered are ear-marked for the free trade. But if entered 5 waiting for the prices to hit your entry criteria, if your 4th or 5th trade is executed first you are charged for the trade.
I am a day trader by profession and although primarily trade other financial products, I have had a equities account with Scottrade for 1 year now. Most of the tools and resources that Scottrade offers are sufficient for most investors. For advanced traders they might come up short, but you likely have other services that fill in the gaps. Their chartign and technical indicators are sufficient. The screening tools for stocks, mutual funds and EFT are very usefule when you know the criteria for the investments you want. Simply enter your filtering criteria and you get a list that can be further filtered if desired.
With that said, I had several problems with their setup and getting what was promised (free trades). Initially it took longer than normal to get my deposit credited to my account. I was referred by an existing account holder so me and the account holder would receive 3 free trades. I received my first placed trade for free, but then had to pay for the next several before getting my free trades back after contacting my local broker office. The reason is when you input a trade the free trade is marked internally in their system as used, but if you modify or delete the order before it is actually fullfilled then the system is not designed to credit your account. This must be done manually by their employees. Due to human error, this doesn't alays happen. Because of the system design, if you input several positions, only the first 3 entered are ear-marked for the free trade. But if entered 5 waiting for the prices to hit your entry criteria, if your 4th or 5th trade is executed first you are charged for the trade.