I Have Money, Now Who do I invest it through?

I received a request from one of the members of our group about which online broker to use to invest their money with. Although I have one particular online broker that I trade with (which will be revealed at the end of this post), I feel like it is only fair for me to give a comparison between the companies to support my reasoning behind my choice.

This article is written with the assumption that the user will only be using these online brokers for online stock trading only. Mutual funds are a whole different story and a different article will be written to address that issue.

Below is a link to the comparison between the online brokers:

PDF List of Online Brokers

All of the provided data is based on the assumption that the user will not be using any broker assisted trading. In addition to that, all information listed above was gathered from the companies' websites as well as through interaction with their customer service departments.

So after all consideration, I decided to go with TDAmeritrade as my online stock broker. The reason why I chose them was because out of all the brokers that I called, their associates seemed to be most knowledgeable and friendly. In addition to that, their interface is really easy to use and they have a lot of help topics that a novice investor can use to educate themselves on the ins and outs of trading stocks.

At the time that I chose TDAmeritrade, I only researched 3 other companies (Sharebuilder, E-trade and Scottrade). Given the knowledge that I have today, if I could do it all over again, I would more than likely choose TradeKing as my online broker as they have close to the cheapest trades as well as some of the highest customer satisfaction rates I could find online.

As usual, leave your comments below about your experience (good and bad) with online brokers. All feedback is always welcomed!