In the latest issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, they rated a dozen discount brokers on a variety of factors including commission, research & tools, fees, investment options, “easy of use,” and customer service. The results were pretty close to the results of Smart Money’s 2008 ranking of the best discount brokers.

Kiplinger’s Best Discount Brokers

1. Fidelity
2. Charles Schwab
3. Muriel Siebert
4. TradeKing
5. E*Trade
6. OptionsHouse
7. TD Ameritrade
8. WellsTrade
9. Firstrade
10. OptionsXpress
11. Zecco
12. Scottrade

VS. Smart Money 2008 Best Discount Brokers

Smart Money’s best were:

1. E*Trade
2. Fidelity
3. TradeKing
4. TD Ameritrade
5. Charles Schwab

Looking solely at these two rankings, Fidelity did the best scoring a 1st and 2nd across the two lists. Charles Schwab, TradeKing, and E*trade also remained consistently in the Top 5. The only real difference is in the ranking of TD Ameritrade and Muriel Siebert, though that could be in how they factor in commissions. Kiplinger’s doesn’t seem to care as much at Muriel Siebert is almost 3x as expensive as TradeKing.

Many of the scores confirmed the results found in Smart Money’s ranking, such as TradeKing scoring 5 out of 5 in customer service (pretty impressive considering their low $4.95 a trade commission). Smart Money’s winner, E*Trade, took fifth place in the Kiplinger’s listing of the best discount brokers.

It’s not that surprising that Zecco was listed so far back, they seem to have a problem shedding the negative aspects of “discount,” unlike other brokers, and continue to rate pretty poorly against their peers. I was surprised to see Scottrade dead last considering they rated rated the highest in investor satisfaction by JD Power & Associates but I suppose you have take all rankings with a grain of salt.

If you don’t have a copy of the magazine, Cap has a full listing of the scores.

If you visit the E*Trade homepage, you’ll see a big yellow star that names E*Trade the #1 premium broker of 2007 by Smart Money magazine and “Best of the Breed” in Money Magazine in August 2007. If you visit the Scottrade homepage, you see a blurb about a J.D. Power and Associates Award for “Highest in Investor Satisfaction with Online Services” award. And if you visit Zecco homepage, they don’t have any awards posted. Does that mean E*Trade is better than Scottrade and Scottrade is better than Zecco? Maybe, maybe not! So I wanted to match up all the awards and ratings and come up with my own ranking of the best online discount broker.

The List: I started with all the Premium and Discount brokers from Smart Money 2007 Brokerage Ratings page and then removed anyone with commissions greater than $10. That left me with E*Trade, Banc of America, TD Ameritrade, WellsTrade, Scottrade, Firstrade, WallStreet*E, SogoInvest, TradeKing and then I added Zecco, simply because they offer $0 trades, and Sharebuilder, because they offer a unique discount purchasing program. I removed Banc of America, WellsTrade, and TD Ameritrade because they’re affiliated with larger banks, I wanted standalone brokers.

E*Trade

E*Trade, one of the priciest of the online discount brokers, with a $9.99 trade commission, has won several awards in its own right. #1 premium broker of 2007 by Smart Money magazine and “Best of the Breed” in Money Magazine in August 2007. One startling ranking was one for Kiplinger’s in 2006, where E*Trade was rated 9th (the only other online discount broker on the list was Firstrade at #4 - #1 was optionsXpress but their trades cost $14.95).

Scottrade

Scottrade was rated the highest in investor satisfaction by JD Power & Associates and beat out all other comers on the list, including E*Trade and TD Ameritrade, which is amazing considering trades cost a mere $7. While the scoring for this was for satisfaction and not scope of offering (though it does include information resources and trade execution), which many other awards are based on, it still speaks volumes about the happiness of Scottrade customers.

SogoTrade

SogoTrade, once known as SogoInvest, is as bare bones as you can get, running the caboose of the discount broker train according to Smart Money magazine. To be honest, you can’t expect much at $3 a trade and you don’t get more than the ability to trade. I looked for awards but there were none to be found.

Zecco

If SogoInvest is the caboose, where does that leave Zecco and it’s zero cost commissions? Not a single award to go on, Zecco does offer ten free trades a month if you have a balance over $2,500 but they score last in customer service. While the free trades offer is nice, is it really worth that much? Hardcore traders complain that ten isn’t enough. Novice traders shouldn’t be trading ten times a month. With no name recognition and little to offer, I’d skip them.

Sharebuilder

Sharebuilder isn’t really a discount broker in the traditional sense because you pay $4 a trade but it has to be done on a schedule, meaning the following Tuesday. So in a sense you can buy stock at a cheap price but you have less control over it. Sharebuilder was recently acquired by ING Direct and they’re also, currently, the only broker to offer promotion codes for free money.

The Awards Sites

Below are links to the award pages I could find:

Update: Smart Money just released the results of their 2008 Brokerage Ratings.

Smart Money 2007 Brokerage Ratings - The rankings from 2007 listed TradeKing as the number one discount broker, their second in a row. The full ratings, in order from best to worst, were Scottrade, Firstrade, OptionsXpress, Muriel Siebert, WallStreet*E, SogoInvest.

2006 Kiplingers Ratings - For a $50,000 account, the rankings were: optionsXpress, Muriel Siebert, Wells Fargo, Firstrade, Fidelity, Vanguard, TradeKing, Schwab, E*Trade, Scottrade, and TD Ameritrade.

For JD Power & Associates, I invite you to search on their site.

Need to absolutely reach your brokerage right now? Here’s a handy resources of all the brokerages I am aware of, their phone numbers, hours of operation, and a link to the brokerage’s contact page. On that page you’ll usually find a Fax number, overnight mail address, regular mail address, email addresses, and sometimes even an online chat. In many cases, there are multiple telephone numbers listed, I chose the one for existing brokerage clients (if that’s not what you need, just hit up the link and you’ll find the whole list).

Brokerage	Phone Number	Hours of Operation	Contact
Charles Schwab	800-435-4000	24/7	link
E*Trade	800-ETRADE-1	7AM-Midnight ET	link
Fidelity	800-544-6666	Unknown	link
Firstrade	800-869-8800	8:30AM-9PM ET M-F	link
Merrill Lynch	800-MERRILL	24/7	link
optionsXpress	888-280-8020	9AM-5:30 ET M-F	link
Scottrade	800-619-SAVE	Unknown	link
Sharebuilder	800-747-2537	8AM-9PM ET M-F	link
TDAmeritrade	800-669-3900	7AM-8PM ET M-F	link
T. Rowe Price	800-225-7720	8AM-8PM ET M-F	link
TradeKing	877-495-5464	8AM–6PM ET M-F	link
UBS	None	Online only	link
Vanguard	877-662-7447	24/7	link
Wachovia Securities	877-879-2495	8AM-8PM ET M-F	link
WellsTrade	800-TRADERS	24/7	link
Zecco.com	909-657-6655	9AM-6PM (EST) M-F	link

Did I miss your brokerage? Let me know and I’ll add their phone number.

This is a guest post authored by frugal at My1stMillionAt33.

Before I tell you about my terrible experience with Scottrade, let me first compare several online brokerage firms in terms of commission costs:

1. Ameritrade Izone: Best for active traders. $5 per trade, very cheap rate for option contract at $5 + $0.75 per contract.
2. Scottrade: Best for casual traders and/or investors. $7 per trade. $0 for loaded mutual fund, but $17 for most other non-loaded mutual funds. Option contract at $7 + $1.25 per contract. Has offering on CD & fixed income bonds. Can only do the following option trades: buying put/call, or sell covered call.
3. ETrade: More expensive compared to both Ameritrade Izone and Scottrade, unless trading more than 1500 trades per quarter.
4. Sharebuilder: Good for long term investor. $4 for automatic investment, and can be as low as $1. Selling is $12 to $20 depending on the plan. The biggest downside is that you give up the control on the market timing for your buy order. Instead you will do time-averaging through automatic investment.
5. BuyAndHold: Best for asset allocator and long term investor. I will recommend this to anyone who is currently using Sharebuilders. I like their $14.99 per month for unlimited number of “window” trades which get routed 3 times a day. With $120 $180 a year, you can buy and build 1000 stock portfolio if you want (just kidding, but it’s true). I don’t think you can beat this deal, especially after http://www.freetrade.com/ (under Ameritrade) is gone.
6. FirsTrade: Even better than Scottrade. I’m sure everyone has lamented the reduction in the NTF program for mutual funds at Scottrade. Well, if you use FirsTrade, you can get it back. Yes, ALL mutual fund trades are FREE. And the stock trades are 5 cents cheaper at $6.95. Their pricing model is essentially the same as the old Scottrade. But they don’t have any physical branches. If you want to open an account with 5 free trades, PLEASE send me (frugal) an email, and I will give you the referral code to get the free 5 trades.

Enough of cheap commissions, but if it is not reliable, it is pretty much useless. So back to my Scottrade bad experiences. My problems with them is that their internet servers are getting so unreliable, especially the first half hour right after the market opens, that it is no longer usable.

1. One time I tried to day trade a stock, and I almost got sacked by Scottrade. I placed limit order, and I was barely able to cancel and modify my entry price in time because their servers kept non-responding.
2. The second time, it was pretty much unforgiveable. I put in a limit order, and when I attempted to cancel the order, I simply cannot cancel it, even though it is still showing on my screen as open order. Somehow somewhere there is a server problem. Minutes later, my limit order became executable. I called up customer services, and they could not determine whether my order was filled or not. After an hour, my order got executed with a timestamp of an hour later. Scottrade claims that the timestamp is the reporting time, not the executed time, and my order was filled minutes later, instead of an hour later. Scottrade refused to correct anything, but simply blaimed everything on the delays of the market makers.
3. Yesterday, again, stupid me, I was doing trades near market open. I am so certain that I cancelled my order. But I had some problem with their server again in the morning. After a couple of hours, I finally found out that my “un-cancelled” order got executed. They claimed that I never cancelled the order. They really have a big problem with this process. At the end of cancellation screen, there is never a confirmation number given out. I can never write down any # to prove that I have attempted to cancel my order. So after a long talk of repeating the same information over and over, and an eventual non-callback, it appears again that they will not do anything to my phantom trade becoming real and losing significant money in such a big down day.

I know that FirsTrade has its problems, especially with market quotes right after market starts. But at least there is never a problem with non-responding servers that give you a page-not-found error. Probably because they are smaller company. In any case, I am moving majority if not all of my money out of Scottrade. I’m so fed up with their parrot-talking customer non-service. I was planning to move my tradings to Ameritrade Izone, but after reading some comments at Dogs of the Dow, I’m a little hesitating now. If you have recent positive experience with Ameritrade or any online brokerages besides Scottrade, would you please suggest them to me? I don’t really know where I could find a reasonable priced and reliable brokerage now. I plan to use FirsTrade for now. Since I never tried their streamer, maybe FirsTrade streamer will not have quoting problem. I can always use the other online brokerage accounts for quote too, so it won’t be such a problem.

Thanks in advance for your online brokerage suggestions to me. Cheap commission is not everything. Without reliability, all (stock) bets are off. I’m planning to take my complaints to NASD. By the way, I really miss the reliability offered by Datek, which was bought by Ameritrade. That was my first reason of moving to Ameritrade since I assume that the platform would be similarly reliable. And I hope you will find both FirsTrade and BuyAndHold useful.