It wasn’t that long ago that a person would need a professional broker in order to make trades on the stock market.   You would call up your broker and place you order, and then the broker would go to the open market in order to get your order filled.  Those days are history.  There are many online discount brokers that offer incredibly cheap stock trading fees.

With an online discount broker you are able to research, chart, and execute your own trades.  You are in complete control of your finances.  Most of these online brokers don’t offer any sort of investment advice, however.  If you are looking for investment advice you may have to go the route of a traditional broker or look at on of the online hybrid brokers.   Scottrade and Charles Schwab both operate local branch offices and have various financial management services.

The best online trading sites are the ones that fit your personal needs.   Sogotrade is the absolute cheapest trading site that I have found.  They offer trades starting at $3.00 for unlimited shares.  This is a very big discount on the cost of trading for active traders.  ThinkorSwim has arguably the best software package.   You can even code your own technical indicators with this software. TradeKing and Zecco are both competitively priced discount brokers with good track records.  Then there are the two hybrid brokers that I mentioned above.  Of those two, Scottrade is much cheaper on a per trade basis.  It is often nice to be able to go talk to an actual person about your stock portfolio.

The best advice is to test out a broker before depositing any cash into your account.  Make sure you like the trading interface.  Is customer support adequate?  There are other factors to consider when opening a trading account besides the bottom line.