As I mentioned in another thread, I may be brokerage shopping. I currently have an account with Scottrade, which initially appealed to me because they (1) have a local branch office about 20 minutes away, (2) have no fees for buy-and-hold account holders, and (3) have $7 online trades. The downside with Scottrade is they offer relatively little in the way of research and/or investor handholding. This has been fine for me, since I only own 3 individual stocks, and have held them since 2001 (or so).

I'm looking for advice/recommendations on brokerages you might use, and if so, why you use them. Specifically, I'm interested in the quality of research tools they provide, but any insight would be helpful.

Also, I'm just generally curious about how people here play the investment game

I use E*Trade for stocks and some banking. I like the free ATM and the high interest rate. With $50K in their accounts you qualify for $9.99 trades and some other perks. I know what I want when I buy, so research is not that important. I like the ability to use their money transfer feature when I need to move funds to cover a stock buy. Also, I use this feature to get funds to Vanguard, where I have all of my Mutual Funds.

I have used Scottrade for several years. I don't buy & sell as much as I used to so I don't have much insight on which broker is better than another. I also do all of my research elsewhere. I like E*Trade's Clearstation to get other trader's opinions and to look at the MACD and Stochastic graphs. I also use stockcharts.com for more chart analysis and sometimes use americanbulls.com to see candlestick reads and patterns. I am in no way a stock guru! Hope this helps a little.

We use fidelity. The nice perk is we are under a household umbrella for trade costs. This means that even though my portfolio is smaller than Goos' I still get the benefits of his portfolio and the benefit of smaller transaction costs. They do combine everything you have - stocks, mutuals, IRAs, etc to get a grand total of net worth with them.

Vanguard, E*Trade and Schwab all have a similar arrangement. Definitely the way to go - at a minimum it reduces paperwork!

I am sorry but if you guys stressing over trading fees, then I would say zecco is the best since it is 30 free trades a month capped at 10 free per day. I have been using them and getting my research elsewhere. They don't have a clean interface, but it is worth saving 5-7 dollars per trade.