If you want to go
beyond the online auto-trading brokers, there are a
number of useful places you can look.
Kiplinger's recent survey of 11 different firms
assessed them according to a wide variety of criteria,
while also allowing for the differences that arise from
different sized accounts - $50,000 and up and over
$500,000. Interestingly, the winner across all criteria
for both sized accounts was the same.
SmartMoney.com provides a ranking of different
various brokers, dividing them into three main
categories - premium, full-service and discount. It does
"live" testing of them as a hypothetical buy-and-hold
customer with a $50,000 account who invests in stocks,
bonds and funds and who also writes covered calls.
J.D. Power and Associates, in their 2007
studies, rank brokers in two main categories,
Online
Investor Satisfaction and
Full Service Investor Satisfaction. In doing so,
they look at a number of different criteria including cost,
trade execution, information resources, website
capability and customer service. In each case, the
studies are based on the
responses of just over 5,000 investors.
Keynote, who measure internet performance, have
established a Transaction Performance Index for Broker
Web Sites.
This shows "the average response times and success rates
for creating a standard stock-order transaction." It
currently measures the performance of twelve different brokerage
firms.
