Before opening an account I called and asked about making purchases on the Toronto Exchange.

After I funded the account the story changed, from $9.95 with $50 to have the certificates sent to me, to they do not do the Toronto Exchange. The floor staff put me on hold to check with the manager. When I asked to talk to a manager, she put me on hold again, came back on the line and said to call back tommorrow, when I asked again to talk to the manager, she said it would be a waste of time. This manager, named Thomas, was helpful, said the service could be done at $45 and $50. Thomas said he would follow up.

The next day follow up was started with the same floor staff. She informed me that again the services were not available, asked to talk to a supervisor again. This time was connected to David Trip. Was told that the service could be done for a $45 fee but did not think the certificates could be available.

Basically my initial funding into this brokerage was held by them for a week before it was returned to my bank and I could fund an account with a broker wbeepable to do Toronto Exchange buys. Three of the five people I talked to sounded rude and unwilling to help. End result was a waste of a time and money.

They may sound like they know what they are doing, but in fact I did not see them preform anything but the simplest transactions.

I have been using Fidelity for both personal investing and for managing my 401K for over 10 years. I like the fact that all my accounts for the kid's collegte funding, 401K, stock investments are easy to manage from one place. I think that the conditional trading is a great feature. Here is how I use it: I purchase a stock, and immediately use the conditional training to put in a sell limit and stop loss, so then I can walk away and not manage it every day. The two improvements that Fidelity could make would be to not cancel these, sometimes they just dissappear and I have to re-enter them. The other one is to a better job at tracking international stocks, you can't put in conditional sell orders for stocks like Lenovo or Vevendi which are out of the country. On international individual stocks they don't even show daily gains or losses. However, their mutual fund purchases are really easy and have good research tools to make decisions.

I've been using TDAmeritrade for well over 10 years. I was using Ameritrade before the merger. I'm not an active trader - I usually only make about 10 trades a year. I've placed orders online and via phone to a live broker. I've placed orders as small as $5,000 and as large as $250,000. I've always found them to be responsive and I've had no problems. I've sent funds to my account via check and via wire with no problems. I once had to get out of Atari fast in a thinly traded market and had to call from work to keep lowering my price - I was paying around $23 for each call change but it was worth it and they got the job done well. The online orders work well - as quantities are executed, they automatically send me an Email so I can follow the progress of my trade. They also have an office near me here in New Jersey - I've never used it but it's nice knowing I can go there in person. Overall, I'm very happy. I thought about changing to a slightly cheaper online broker but I didn't see the point - the cost is about the same and things are working well with Ameritrade.

I requested that TD Ameritrade transfer $5000 from my after tax account to my Roth account. They transferred the $5000 from my IRA account to the Roth account.
When I requested that they fix the problem and they transferred another $5000 from my IRA account to my Roth account. It took two months and about 20 phone calls to get them to correct their mistake. I was told several times that the problem would be corrected by the next day or that it had been corrected. What a headache!

I ahve to admit, my initial experiences with this brokerage were not positive. When I was signing up for my account on TD Ameritrade, we kept running into computer errors, and difficult to understand screens. When the system would not accept my banking information, I had to call their customer service number, and, in the end, had to make my first deposit to my accout by check.

It was more of a hassle than I have encountered with other online brokers.

I do like the low fees, and the amount of detail in the information about various stocks. That alone is worth going with this brokerage. I feel that I can get impartial analysis based on the numbers there, and it cuts down on my research time.

Also, once we got all the kinks out, everything on the site has worked fine. The interface for buying and selling is very easy to follow. It's just that initial sign-up that was a pain.

I have had a great experience with TD-Ameritrade so far. I received a letter from them about 3 months ago regarding a data-loss that they suffered which involved only my e-mail address. They were very direct in discussing the matter and were diligent in my opinion in notifying their customers. Out of concern for my current (and future) credit status having a number of life events pending in the next year I asked their customer service representitive if they would be able to provide a monitoring service for the coming year to reassure me that I would not have any suprises. They were very accomidating and have provided me with a monitoring service through one of their partners. Having a company do the right thing is very important to me and I would not hesitate to do business with TD-Ameritrade if I had to choose a broker again.

All in all this e-broker does a very good job. The site is easy to navigate; pages are simple and informative at the same time. Page view customization is satisfying. I use the broker for dealing with shares and ETFs. Thus no option, no mutual funds, no bonds, no retirement plans for now. Information on selected companies is well chosen. News, which are usually looked up elsewhere too, might be even regarded as excessive. Graphs are excellent. Overall market analyses has its own place and helps get a quick idea about the indices (not only NASDAQ, Amex, DJIA (-: ) very quickly. The online tools are lovely. Until recently I have mostly used the screener and the market motion detector - they are simple and lovely. Now I am learning the excellent performance of the command centre. Help section is very useful and does its purpose outstanding. Bad things? Sure: on the bottom of each screen is a buy-sell-get quote frame. It is disturbing and cannot be removed. Similar with disclaimers and other similar notes at the bottom of the main frame - but this is as I probably should know according to the law. The best security on the planet is right here: if the account gets cracked and misused this e-broker shall reimburse all cash and securities that might have got stolen.