Whats the general opinion on Scottrade?

YamiDiceMan

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I began buying about a month ago so I decided to go with Scottrade. I wanna hear some of the opinions on here. So far I've just used it to buy stock so everything seems fine and dandy to me. What about you guys?
 
I signed up with ST about 1 1/2 years ago and don't like them.

You have to deal with a local office. The central office is good, but if you call the, the call is automatically transferred back to the local one. The local office was helpful getting me to open an account, but then changed to 1 or 2 word answers and unhelpfulness. When I have asked to be transferred to the central office, they've refused.

Things they have screwed up have been holding the results of my trades for 10 days, and not letting me trade again till their cleared. This appears to be a ST wide policy, but the central office said that a request to them would have released my funds, where the local office said it was not possible to release them for more trading. Also it is annoying that any time I've wanted to transfer funds to or from them, they have sent a paper in the mail to me a week later, then upon calling to see what it's for, they've said I have to sign and mail it back to them before transferring any funds. They are slow, inept, have a bad attitude and have basically made it impossible to trade with them and manage a good return on my funds.

I've also had TDAmeritrade for 18 months and like them much better. They have a 24/7 phone long and have always been very helpful, with the exception of one person one time. They answer the phone promptly on almost all occasions that I've called. Their web site is easier to use, much easier than any of the few that I've seen, especially as compared to ST. I'm in the process of looking for another broker to transfer my funds from ST, possibly to Interactive Brokers.
 
I have had a great experience with Interactive Brokers. I started out in a "Sharebuilder" Account, but the trade cost was too high. I have found IB to be a low cost, easy to use broker. You just need a minimum of $10k to open an account, and a minimum $25k in net assets in the account any time in order to day trade US Stocks.
 
I began buying about a month ago so I decided to go with Scottrade. I wanna hear some of the opinions on here. So far I've just used it to buy stock so everything seems fine and dandy to me. What about you guys?

I like them, especially for buying larger chunks of stock. The flat $7 fee is good no matter what the order size.
 
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