Fees/Commissions:  

Scottrade offers some of the best trade fees online, only $7 for trades over $1. This is a great service for small time traders since they only require $500 to open an account, however, they are also perfect for day traders or active traders since their fees are reasonable and straightforward. Scottrade’s margin rates are also pretty low at a negative .25 for balances under 10K.

Investments Offered:  

Though Scottrade doesn’t offer as many investment options as some of the other online brokers, they do have enough that you can diversify your portfolio. This online stock trading service has all of the standard investments including stocks, options, mutual funds and exchange traded funded.

They offer over 1,000 no transaction fee mutual funds and 10,000 load and no-load funds. Additionally, they have some fixed income investments like U.S. Treasury and Agency Issues, bonds, no-fee IRAs and CDs.

Ease of Use:  

This is a good service if you are new to trading. The website and trading platforms are easy to navigate and there are online tutorials to teach you about the different tools. Scottrade Elite, their high–end trading desktop, allows you to add the windows and tools that provide the information you need. When you look up a stock, all of the windows automatically update.

Trading/Investment Tools:  

The Scottrade trader interface provides access to research as well as a knowledge center. Their knowledge center has a variety of calculators, access to news and research as well as information on their educational summits and seminars (which are free to Scottrade customers).

They offer three different trading platforms, Scottrade, Scottrader and Scottrade Elite. Scottrade is designed for the average online user, is easy to use and provides basic stats and good account monitoring tools. Scottrader is stepped up a bit, it has live streaming stock quotes, personal stock lists and quotes, free Dow Jones up-to-the-minute news and it is fully customizable. Scottrade Elite is considered their advanced platform, it has Dow Jones and Comtex news, top performer scanners, charting ability and access to Level II quotes.

We think that Scottrade does a good job at providing trading tools for beginners as well as advanced traders and they offer a fairly comprehensive knowledge center with many informative webcasts. We would like to see them offer a powerful cell phone trading platform soon.

Support/Customer Service:  

You can contact Scottrade by telephone, email and they have over 400 branch offices that you can visit. We would like to see them add more extensive service hours and chat support though.

We liked the flat-fee structure that Scottrade offers that is perfect for low balance investors as well as active traders. They also offer a low margin rate and they have many offices for those that like to see someone face-to-face from time to time.