Scottrade

So I have been actively trading stocks for about 7 years, the last 5 have been with Scottrade. My father hooked me up to them, and at the time you couldn’t beat the $ 7 trades. They also have a lot of on-​line tools for you (I don’t use them, I am a Yahoo! Finance kinda guy) they keep track of your gains, and also have a number of portfolios you can put together, as well as receive email alerts (all pretty important if you are trying to get a specific price) plus they don’t have any extra fees for limit orders (VERY IMPORTANT)
The staff are all friendly, nice, and knowledgeable.
Their website is fairly intuitive and it is easy to find numbers to call people.
I’ve gone through Fidelity, and while they have great tools as well, since I don’t use them I was basically paying for other people’s benefits.
my only complaints — BIG ONE is that while they will pull money out of your bank accounts for drafting purposes they WILL NOT send it back that way, you still have to request them to cut a check THRU THE MAIL (come on people who the hell uses checks anymore?) Second, they won’t/can’t take money directly out of your paycheck, UNLESS you can send it to 2 different accounts at once (huh?) they need to take it into a main account then forward it to your trading account, that makes no sense to me, but then again I only speak English and Portuguese (OK a little Spanish) not Lawyer or Banker talk, those languages make no sense. Perhaps someone smarter than I am can help me understand… they aren’t big enough to have agreements with one or two of the mutual funds that I like, and you can’t buy commodities directly (only through tracking funds)
NOTE: for novice traders … you will notice when you sell stocks you are charged more than $ 7, that is a tax from the SEC not Scottrade hosing you. You will notice it is a percentage (small one) of the sale.